The Changeling
by Annerb
Summary: Ginny is sorted into Slytherin. It takes her seven years to figure out why. In-progress.
1. Year One

Title: The Changeling  
><span>Author<span>: Annerb  
><span>Summary<span>: Ginny is sorted into Slytherin. It takes her seven years to figure out why.  
><span>Categorization<span>: Drama, angst, AU, Ginny-centric with a side of Ginny/Harry  
><span>Warnings<span>: Older teens for adult themes (mentions of sexual assault, violence, underage sexuality and drinking)  
><span>AN: Part of my 'Five New Fandoms in 2011' pledge. This lodged in my brain and grew from a Rewriting History prompt: Harry Potter, Ginny, she's sorted into Slytherin. Special thanks to ziparumpazoo and K. for their beta work. Any remaining errors are my own.

**The Changeling**

_First Year_

"Slytherin!"

It feels, for a moment, as if the entire world has ended as the Sorting Hat's voice rings out through the Great Hall. Not even the heavy cloth down around Ginny's ears can muffle the sound of four horrified gasps, each familiar enough to her as to be distinguished merely by pattern of air.

_There must be some mistake_, she thinks, once in confusion and a second time more forcefully, as if compelling the hat to take it back.

The hat doesn't deign a response, Professor McGonagall (_not_ her head of house) sweeping it off her head in one brisk motion. Ginny perches uncertainly on the edge of the stool, McGonagall's steely eyes already moving to the next frightened eleven year old.

"Miss Weasley," she says crisply. "Your table is on the end."

Ginny glances at the dark sea of green and silver at the far end, the way the entire table seems tucked into the shadows of the edge of the hall. No. No way. This is a mistake.

She turns her head to the Gryffindor table, meets the wide-eyed, horrified stares of her brothers, and stupidly waits for George to crow that it's just a joke, and wasn't it impressive that he could pull a prank this convoluted on her? He'd spent all summer making a fake hat!

George just shares a glance with Fred, identical faces all the way to the pale shock of their cheeks.

"Miss Weasley," McGonagall repeats, her voice no longer sharp. There's a buzz of sound building in the room, people turning and whispering to each other as Ginny refuses to give up her seat.

_Move, _she orders her frozen limbs. _Just get up and move_.

She finds her feet, tries to lift her chin as she walks the great distance to the far table, but the faces waiting there for her are closed, hostile. They whisper behind their hands as she approaches.

She perches on the very end of the table, and doesn't let her hands tremble. Much.

She doesn't remember much of the feast after that.

Later as she settles into her dormitory in the deepest hidden depths of the castle (_not_ a tower, _not_ a nice roaring fire nor a fat lady to welcome them), she gives herself a mental shake and reminds herself that it's just a house. She reminds herself of this again when the girl in the next bunk turns her nose up at Ginny's secondhand things and the other girls follow suit.

Just a house.

That doesn't explain why she feels sick in the green tinged depths. Wrong. As if the lapping waters of the black lake above are pressing down on her. She tugs the curtains tightly closed around her bed and tries not to hear the voices of the other girls.

She lies in her bed that first night staring at the delicate silver embroidery wrapping around her bed. The beasts and dragons seem to swirl and move, creeping in on her in the dark. She firmly keeps her imagination in check, teeth biting down in the inside of her lip. She's never been afraid of the dark and she isn't going to start now.

When the other girls fall quiet, their rhythmic breathing filling the chamber, Ginny shoves back her covers and lifts open her trunk at the foot of the bed. On top is a red and gold scarf knitted by her mother. Ginny grabs it and shoves it down into the deepest recesses of the trunk. It's down there at the very bottom that she finds a book she doesn't remember.

Pulling it out, she see that it is a thin black diary, the cover made of smooth leather. She thinks this must have been a hidden gift from her mother like the scarf, only this one is much more fitting. She blinks back tears and picks up the book, opening it to the first page.

_Ginny Weasley_, she writes carefully. She considers the words for a while before picking up her quill again.

_Ginny Weasley_, she writes,_ is a Slytherin._

Her heart pounds as she stares at the words. Splotches of ink drip from the quill where it hovers uncertainly over the page.

No.

Ginny scribbles across the damning words, quill slashing and obliterating.

_Take it back, take it back, take it back_, she writes beneath it, over and over again.

For the first time that day, something finally cooperates. The ink sinks back into the page, leaving nothing but quiet, creamy expanse as if the words never existed in the first place.

This book will keep her secrets.

She lifts the quill to the surface again and asks the one question that's been echoing in her mind all day-W_hat did I do wrong?_

The words slowly bleed away.

For a moment, she almost wishes the diary could answer.

She wakes the next morning with no great answers, no simple fix. Out in the halls, Fred and George drape their arms over her shoulders and say it's no big deal, but she's been living with them her whole life and knows when they're lying.

It _is_ a big deal.

She doubts she has even begun to understand all the ways in which it's a big deal, just knows it is. Even Percy thinks it, judging from the way he pats her arm awkwardly and solemnly shakes his head back and forth as if to a dirge.

Ginny has never before realized just what a prig he is.

She shares this thought with her diary and wonders if this is viciousness. If this is why she's here. Did the hat see something in her?

She watches the ink sink in and disappear, like an act that never happened. She imagines it makes her feel lighter, just a little bit.

The first time Errol labors his way into the Great Hall with post from home, Ginny imagines her mother's tone is strained. Just words on paper, but she imagines her mother's confusion. Pansy Parkinson, voice perfectly pitched to carry as far down the table as possible, notes she's never seen a more decrepit and pathetic looking owl in her entire life. Did it have some sort of disease?

Ginny lowers her head and forces bone dry toast down her throat.

During the day, she has classes to fill her moments. There's no one to sit with but quiet Smita, the housemate who was unlucky enough to get stuck with Ginny. They don't speak except when Smita needs Ginny to pass her eye of newt, and Ginny doesn't bother trying for anything more.

She learns instead to focus down on the feeling of a wand in her fingers made for her and her alone. If she tries hard enough, this is one place things can bend to her will, work out the way she expects them to. Magic makes sense.

She excels. While Fred and George and Ron are all ease and laughter, surrounded by friends and immersed in the luxury of just sliding by, she pulls marks her mother had begun to give up hope for in her younger brood. It makes Ginny wonder just what Percy and Bill and Charlie and their top marks might have been running from.

At night, she pours her frustration and confusion into the only place she can—her diary. She writes each and every word she thinks but doesn't dare say during the day. Every doubt, every dark feeling, and sometimes it feels like it's the quill moving and not her.

One day it answers back, and it's the most natural thing in the world.

_You aren't alone, Ginny._

His name is Tom. He's her only friend.

She rises from bed the next morning feeling empty, floating like a ghost.

It's easier.

Mid-way through the first term, Bill sends her a letter.'Slytherin, eh?' he says by way of greeting, and she appreciates this lack of coddling. No easing in, just going for broke. 'I went to Madame Puttifut's with a Slytherin girl in my fourth year. We had quite the snog.'

Her hands clench, paper crinkling in her fingers. _It's no big deal._

'Not that you should go around snogging feckless Gryffindors. Certainly not until well after your fourth year.'

Ginny chokes back a laugh, the feeling foreign and forgotten, a smile threatening to crack her face in half from disuse. Mum liked to complain about it, but Bill has always spoken to her like an adult, someone things don't need to be hidden from.

'I know everyone's telling you it's just a house, but I think it's more important that you remember you're a Weasley, and that's the one that matters.'

She sets the letter aside, folding it carefully and pressing it into the pages of her diary.

The problem is that red hair aside, she's beginning to doubt she's really a Weasley. The Weasleys have been in Gryffindor for four generations after all, and the Prewetts another three. She begins to wonder if her mother made some sort of pact with a fairy to have her—the precious only daughter, and this is the unforeseen price.

Maybe she's a Changeling.

She reads about it hidden in the back of the library at lunch, unable to face a table of strangers. Only the books tell her a Changeling child should have untold strength, and she doesn't feel it.

In the end, it's only Tom who understands.

_You don't need anyone else._

She walks around with ink-stained fingers and learns to breathe through the airless moments, to keep walking when she wants to do nothing more than disappear. She could run home, leave this all behind, but she hasn't walked away from a challenge since she was four years old and broke into Bill's trunk to stow away to Hogwarts.

This is her dream, being here. She just never imagined it like this.

"Ginny?" Smita says once during potions, something almost like an inquiry, but when Ginny turns, the girl's face is all hard angles and disapproval.

_She doesn't think you're worthy. But I do._

Ginny feels her gut clench and thrusts the bowl of eviscerated flobberworms towards Smita.

They finish the lesson in silence.

When the black outs begin, she feels a strange sort of relief. Waking up with blood on her fingers and no memory seems a fitting thing for a Slytherin. Isn't it?

Only then people start getting hurt.

_What's going on?_ she scribbles in the pages. _What is happening to me?_

Tom always has the answer. _You're stronger than you know, Ginny. _

By the time she begins to suspect, to work it all out in her increasingly fuzzy mind, there's no one to tell.

She approaches Ron once, the brother who won't even meet her eye anymore, but it's Harry who actually notices her.

"Ginny?" he asks, his flitting attention all too quickly distracted as he frowns at a group of Hufflepuffs deliberately crossing the hall so as not to walk too close to the supposed Heir of Slytherin.

If only they knew.

She can't tell if she wants to laugh or throw up.

In the end she says nothing, not wanting to see the blame there in Harry's eyes. The sense of, _'I knew it.' _

Slytherin.

She shakes her head and walks away with the diary burning against her thigh.

When Tom takes her down to the deepest dark spaces of Hogwarts, she thinks maybe she'll just be able to disappear, judging by the way her body seems to melt into the stone. Only that isn't what she's here for, she realizes all too late. She isn't here for punishment. She's bait.

_He'll come._

Ginny has her doubts.

She lies, more dead than alive it seems, lies there and watches Tom try to rewrite the _pastfuturepresent_. Does absolutely nothing to stop it.

Maybe if she'd been a Gryffindor, she would have been able to.

She's still surprised to wake up and find Harry there. There was a time that might have meant everything to her. He's injured, nearly _died_ for her, even as life begins to rush back into her flesh, not pins and needles, but knives and mallets. There's no point in stopping the tears, the pints and pints she's been collecting all year long.

"It's all right," Harry says, patting her shoulder awkwardly, clearly more comfortable with basilisks and evil wizards than hopeless little girls. "Riddle's gone."

What does that fix, really? She stares down at the ruined diary bleeding ink across his lap. Her words—her secrets—blurred and tarnished as they ooze out on the floor.

She shakes her head, pulling her legs hard into her chest. Harry never should have come down here. Not for her.

"Ginny," he says, bewildered concern weighting his tone.

"I'm a Slytherin," she mumbles miserably into her knees. Just like Tom. Just like Pansy and Malfoy and every dark wizard who has ever fallen.

More than anything she wants to hear Harry say, 'So what?', to tell her it doesn't matter. But he just stares back at her, confusion furrowing his brow. For the first time he doesn't look like a hero, but rather a scared little boy. She isn't sure what to make of that.

_Aberration_, comes Tom's dying whisper, thorns still dug in and holding despite the fact that he should be gone. _You don't fit his careful columns of good versus Slytherin. And yet he was the one they all suspected._

Ginny wants to shake the voice away, claw it out of her skull. There's painful anger here over something she does not understand, things she's too young to grasp, just knows that for all she poured into Tom, he poured some things back.

These are not the sorts of things a little girl is supposed to feel.

Try as she might, she can't see Harry Potter in quite the same light ever again. Maybe he's still a hero, but she's never going to be a princess. (Was the hat right? Is this who she really is?) Her silly crush doesn't stand a chance against the weight of all that.

She lets Harry lead her out and save her and explain away her failings to her waiting family, but knows she's leaving something behind she'll never get back. Innocent little Ginny Weasley never leaves that Chamber.

The greatest irony is that her disgrace makes her a proper Slytherin at last.

In the common room everyone vies for her attention, sidling up next to her and asking what it had been like, to have such a beast under her control, to know she had the ability to kill and destroy, wash this place of mudbloods, if only she hadn't been caught in her own trap.

_Mudbloods_.

She thinks of Hermoine Granger and her frizzy mane, the way she smiles at Ginny in the halls, kind, but guarded. The way that even she, the smart one, is not completely sure of Ginny out of the context of Gryffindor.

"How did you get away with it for so long?" her housemates want to know.

She doesn't know what to say, how to explain to them about victims and lack of choice and pouring out precious secrets and feelings to someone who didn't deserve them. Doesn't know how to risk speaking without betraying her weakness. She may not know much, but even she already understands the danger of weakness. She needs to speak, to find the perfect lie, but her throat freezes and betrays her.

Only somehow her silence does not condemn her.

This is how she unexpectedly learns the power of silence. The power of _not_ acting, when all she'd ever been raised to know was running blindly ahead.

When they demand a recounting, Ginny presses her lips together in a thin line, looking sideways at her housemates. Understand that people will fill in the blanks with whatever they need.

It holds her long enough to survive the last few chaotic days of the term, to keep herself together until she can finally slip away. She doesn't like to think of it as running, but she's grateful all the same for the sheer distance from Hogwarts and the relentless memories that her family's impromptu trip affords.

The harsh sunlight of Egypt burns into her skin, her family pressing in on all sides. Maybe it will be enough to make Tom fade, like a picture left too long in direct light.

She hopes.

Out on the sandy dunes, Bill steps up next to her, hand mussing her hair with distracted affection. A few feet away, the twins are trying to shove Percy into a tomb. It's all so startlingly _normal_, like the last year never happened, that Ginny finds it a little hard to breathe.

Bill squeezes her shoulder. "Your first year in Slytherin and you already faced off with You Know Who and derailed his plans, eh?"

That isn't exactly the way it happened, but Ginny doesn't have the heart to correct him (or perhaps her mouth has learned too well to keep its secrets). Maybe it doesn't matter anyway. The only other person to know the full truth of what happened down there is Harry, and he's thousands of miles away with no clearer understanding than her own.

Bill leans in closer, grinning mouth near her cheek like a conspirator. "What a disappointment you would be to good old Salazar."

She smiles because it's expected. But also because proving to be a poor Slytherin is supposed to be a _good_ thing, right?

He tugs on her braid. "Weasley," he says, an affectionate accusation.

Ginny leans into Bill's side, thinking that maybe she'll let herself believe that.

Just for a little while.


	2. Year Two

_**Year Two**_

This year is going to be different.

Or so Ginny tells herself over and over again on the train.

She's proven right, in a way, when dark-garbed demons climb on mid-way to Hogwarts. That's different in a whole new way (horrifying), but one that only manages to suck out any optimism she may have been clinging to. She can't quite explain it, the way every tiny bit of warmth is leeched from her body as they pass, gliding silently just a few inches above the floor. They pause, the empty places where a face should be turning towards her compartment. Ice frosts the glass and a buzzing builds in Ginny ears.

_Aberration_.

She's transfixed, trapped, until the demons move on, departing as quietly as they appeared.

Ginny shivers and pulls her worn robes more closely around her body. The entire train seems subdued for the rest of the ride, timid whispers about the guards of Azkaban and an escaped prisoner tripping down the halls.

Dementors. They were something she grew up hearing about in her brothers' twisted idea of a bedtime story, but had never seen. She never wants to see one ever again.

Luckily, the floating horrors don't follow them inside Hogwarts, staying outside the school gates, but she still thinks she can feel them hovering. Or maybe it's just that after a summer bundled up in the boisterous chaos of her family, Hogwarts feels cold. She doesn't remember it being so still, so quiet despite the press of students. It could just be Slytherin's hushed spaces under the lake that are dreadful. Too much like the Chamber, hard stones under her bones…

She avoids the common room as much as she can, sneaking up onto the grounds. Not towards the gates and those _things_, but always away.

The grass around the lake is tall and soft, too long left untrod during the summer holiday. Her trainers wear a path day after day as she walks. She lingers in a spot within sight of Hagrid's hut and the edge of the Forbidden Forest. Sometimes she wonders about the things hiding in there.

She can understand the impulse.

Mostly, she just stands on the edge of that hill and stares.

Sometimes she lets gravity win just to see what it feels like—wind and adrenaline and heat in her muscles. Her feet trip down the steep hill towards the trees, momentum keeping her right on the edge of losing her footing once and for all. Then she hits the flat, legs buckling, and she falls hard to her knees, feeling her flesh bruise and split. Twisting onto her back, she gasps great breaths, her chest burning, face flushed with exertion as she stares up at the clear summer sky.

She gets up, climbs the hill, and does it all over again.

* * *

><p>The notice appears on the bulletin board the third week of school, hard crisp edges around angular black writing:<p>

_Trials for House Quidditch Team will be held Saturday at 9. _

Someone jostles Ginny from behind, people shouting to each other across the room. She lets herself get elbowed to the back of the pack. She can't forget the words anyway, not now that she's seen them.

She knows what she wants. Wants more than anything.

She's only a second year, but she doesn't think on that. She just remembers the breathless press of wind and gravity working against her as she tumbled down Hagrid's hill. She doesn't consider that maybe she just wants to be a part of something, once and for all.

(Over the summer her father told her, "You have to make of this what you can, Ginny." Her mother had simply said, "You can always come home."

Ginny has no intention of running home.)

The day of tryouts dawns crisp and clear, the first taste of autumn in the air. There was a time she might have taken that as a good sign.

"Hey," someone calls as she walks out on the pitch with her pathetic borrowed school broom. "I think you're in the wrong place, girlie."

The speaker is Terence Higgs, returning chaser. He's got at least a foot and half on Ginny, but she thinks with silent derision that 'girlie' is probably the best insult he is capable of. That kind of undoes a lot of the intimidation. A chaser is about more than height.

She's prepared for them to give her a rough time, to try to tell her she can't try out, but there aren't any rules against second years having brooms, or trying out, and more importantly, she _knows_ she can do this, size and age and experience not withstanding.

In the knowing is the power, she tells herself.

Only then the captain, a troll of a boy called Marcus Flint, looks over at her, his face hardening. Before he can tell her to get lost, Ginny hops on the broom and streaks up towards the stands as smoothly as the wobbling hand-me-down can manage.

The sound of voices and harsh laughter follow her, riding along on the wind, but it's the crack of a bat that she's really listening for, the telltale whiz and whine that follows it. She holds her trajectory until the last possible second before shifting her weight, letting the broom drop away under her in a daredevil move that would have given her Mum heart palpitations if she were here to witness it. For a full beat of her heart she's falling, completely weightless.

Ginny's left thigh burns with exertion, but digs in hard against the broom, swinging her body completely around just in time to see the Bludger streak by less than half a foot above her head. She does not flinch away, even as her hair flutters in the breeze of the close call. She does not yell, just hovers, meeting the stares of the boys still on the ground. She ignores the boy with the bat in his hand and instead watches Flint, daring him.

She feels the impatient vibration of the broom under her hands, but knows that to budge now is to surrender. (Fred and George and Charlie and Ron…they taught her this one minuscule skirmish at a time.) All she's asking for is a chance.

Eventually Flint looks away, waving his arm. "Okay, you lazy wankers. Get your arses up on your brooms."

With surprising efficiency and authority (though peppered more often than not with obscenities), Flint runs them through a vigorous series of drills. All except Malfoy, that is. He seems content to float above all of them, drifting aimlessly on his shiny, top of the line broom.

His contribution: his father's bountiful wealth.

Ginny sighs with disgust. Distracted by her thoughts, she doesn't notice the Quaffle coming until it's slamming into her solar plexus. She manages to snatch it up against her chest and refuses to let it stun her, just takes great swallowing breaths while she weaves and dodges for the goals in the distance. She nearly loses her head to a vicious Bludger from behind, but manages to swivel hard around and fling the Quaffle into the lower right ring.

She focuses relentlessly after that.

What she lacks in size she makes up for with speed and agility and a reckless sort of nerve that serves her well as chaser. Flint makes her run drills longer and harder than anyone else, but if he hopes to break her with harsh conditions, he's chosen the wrong tactic. She feels a fire burning in her stomach, something familiar but almost forgotten, like for the first time she feels a little like she did before Tom. Before Slytherin.

Up in the air, it feels like anything is possible.

She's still nearly trembling with fatigue when Flint finally lets her get her feet on the ground. He gives her a long hard stare, maybe checking one last time if she'll just give up. She doesn't.

As he passes her by, he smacks her hard on the back, nearly planting her exhausted body face first in the dirt. "Just don't mess this up, Weasel."

She leans heavily on her Cleansweep and hopes he doesn't notice. "Excuse me?"

He doesn't stop walking, talking back at her over his shoulder. "Practice on Mondays and Thursdays at 4." He points to a shiny, only slightly used Nimbus 2001 leaning against a wall. "Don't be late. Or I'll change my mind."

She watches him walk away, waiting for the punch line, the vicious ending to what must be a joke. The pitch is dead silent though, and she's all alone. It's the arrival of the Ravenclaw team that finally pushes her to exchange the Cleansweep for the smooth handle of the Nimbus. It seems to hum against her skin in recognition.

She's on the team.

She gives herself one long moment to revel in it—she will have all night to scrutinize every last inch of the broom in her hands. For now she simply imagines the looks on her brothers' faces. Then she takes a measured breath, props the broom up on her shoulder, and reminds herself that she still has a lot to prove.

She smiles, just a little, as she walks back up to the castle. Her hand rubs across her stomach. She's not sinking quietly into the stones this time.

Never again.

* * *

><p>Word travels fast through the ranks—little Ginny Weasley stealing her way on to the Quidditch team. Her housemates size her up in the common room. She hears half swallowed whispers of 'heir of Slytherin' from time to time, nestled in right next to 'chaser'.<p>

It's not what she ever thought her life would be, but maybe that's okay.

Even Malfoy deigns to speak to her, most of the younger students following suit. (The older ones ignore her like they ignore all the young ones, too involved with OWLs and NEWTs and sneaking out onto the grounds to snog.)

"Ginny," Malfoy will say, drawling her name out long, arm thrown over her shoulder.

She knows what she wants to say (_your father gave me that diary_), but that is never what she can say. Because for a bit, _belonging_ is so much nicer. This is her house, her life, and she needs to make of it what she can. And Slytherin can't be so bad as they say, not if she ended up here, right?

She practices with the same abandon she shows her lessons. Given something to focus on, she refuses to do anything less. She will not give Flint a single moment to regret his decision.

He just ends every practice with a slap to her back and a warning not to screw up. She grows to appreciate the predictability of it.

She watches the first match between Gryffindor and Hufflepuff with anticipation tingling in her fingers, cataloging each and every move used by the chasers—the good to emulate, the bad to avoid. Her absorption is so complete that she doesn't notice the Dementors have wandered out of bounds until the chill shudders across her skin, a hated voice ghosting in her ears.

People scream and push to their feet, fingers pointing at a black blur plummeting towards the ground.

_Not so special after all, _Tom mocks.

Harry Potter is falling out of the sky.

Ginny's heart drags up into her throat, her hand pulling out her wand before she realizes she has no idea how to save him, no way to return the favor.

_The boy who went splat._

"No," Ginny says. (Screams? She doesn't know. Tom is still just _laughing_.)

Then Dumbledore is there, face pale and furious and energy crackling from his entire body like a silver explosion that forces the Dementors back. Harry hits the ground a fraction of a moment later with barely a sound, as if the entire world's been turned into soft downy pillows.

Ginny's knees buckle, dumping her back on her seat.

If she were more fanciful, she might have taken that as a sign of things to come. But she's not. Her heart gradually settles back where it is meant to be, her pulse calm. Three days later she's able to climb on to her broom with no more trepidation than before.

She forces herself to forget all over again that sometimes gravity wins.

* * *

><p>They win their first match.<p>

Sure, Ravenclaw is nothing to worry about really, but Ginny scores seven goals, even after getting her shoulder grazed by a Bludger two minutes into the game. If she gave herself a moment to think about it, she might wonder at the accuracy of that Bludger coming from the wrong end of the field, only she doesn't, because her team is smiling at her and reliving their greatest moments from the match as they stream back up to the castle in one huge group. It feels like maybe she's actually a part of something for the first time since she came here. She thinks they may finally accept her, now that's she's proven what she can do.

She's never felt quite so alive as she did on that broom, screaming crowds on all sides.

The common room is loud and boisterous and somehow warmer that night. The heat of bodies and ringing sound of raised voices clear the chill from the space, and when they pass around a bottle of something not quite named, she sips it along with everyone else despite the taste.

She doesn't notice when the others stop, when they begin to slap her on the back and urge just one more swallow, Malfoy's voice close to her ear.

Things get fuzzy really fast after that.

Later she will have vague memories of saying yes to the tattoo, to feeling no pain at all as they grouped around her and called her one of their own. She will not allow herself to remember that she alone has a jagged little green line of a snake twisting across the inside of her wrist.

She does this because this is _belonging_. And it's good.

She still wakes up the next morning feeling like death hovering on the edge of a bridge. She pulls back her curtains with a groan. The lamplight sears into her eyes and for once she's actually thankful that their dormitory is underground. Sunlight just might kill her.

"You look terrible."

Ginny squints up to find her roommate Smita standing next to her bed, holding a smoking goblet.

Ginny frowns. "Gee. Thanks."

Smita doesn't seem to take her chilly tone as a hint to leave her the hell alone, instead holding out the goblet.

Ginny eyes it warily. For all she knows, Smita has decided to poison her for lack of anything else to do this weekend, but she's too miserable to worry out motivations. Reaching for the goblet, she takes a hesitant sip. It burns down her throat, bringing tears to her eyes, but before she can yell in protest, it settles in her stomach like a warm golden glow pulsing through her body. It softens all the edges, and Ginny doesn't hesitate to swallow the rest down.

By the time she empties the cup, she almost feels human again.

"Thank you," Ginny says in a rush, peering up at her roommate a little more closely. Is it just her aching head or does Smita look slightly less mean today? Ginny tentatively smiles at her.

Smita does not smile back. She simply nods her head once and turns on her heel and leaves.

So much for that theory.

Ginny lowers her head carefully back to the bed.

"Someone wake me up when it's Monday," she mumbles to the empty room.

* * *

><p>Ginny arrives at the Great Hall a few minutes late for breakfast. Her brothers step up on either side of her before she even gets a foot in the hall.<p>

"Where did you learn to fly like that?" George demands.

Fred scoffs loudly. "Clearly from watching us all these years, George."

Ginny rolls her eyes and decides not to spill her secrets. All they ever did was turn her into a thief. They didn't teach her Quidditch. They taught her perseverance. Daring.

She thinks in some ways those are way more important anyway.

Shaking her brothers off at the Gryffindor table, she crosses the room to her own table.

"Morning, Six," Bletchley says, nodding to her. "How's the head?"

Ginny gives him a wry smile, feeling her cheeks flush. "Still attached. Barely."

They all laugh, Flint tossing her a piece of toast.

Ginny smiles wider and reaches for the pumpkin juice.

After breakfast, Malfoy walks out of the hall with her, Pansy and Goyle and Crabbe silent sentinels on either side.

Malfoy is still single-mindedly reliving their victory. "Did you see the way I grabbed that snitch from under his nose?" he says, arm reaching out as if to reenact the play.

That's not exactly the way it happened, but Ginny smiles nonetheless, tucking her books into her chest and nodding along.

She's one of them now. Really and truly. And being one of them means having people to walk with in the halls, and sit with at meals. And after classes every day, she has a shiny, expensive amazing broom to ride, one she knows her brothers are jealous of down to the bone. It's more than she ever could have hoped.

Still, when she passes a poster of Sirius Black in the halls one day, she finds herself staring at him screaming out silently from a tattered page. She wonders what it was, that final straw that made him break, that made him kill. A year ago she would have looked away, unable to face it. Now she's mesmerized and doesn't know why.

But none of that really matters, because she has Quidditch. It emboldens her, the cold fingers of air in her hair, gravity pulling and fighting for control of her flesh. She is its master. She doesn't believe in the fall, only the climb.

She and Smita even talk sometimes now, about more than simple potion ingredient requests. It's…nice.

Nice is enough. She's tired of being alone.

Laughing along with Malfoy and his friends as they walk in the halls, Ginny keeps her eyes straight ahead when she passes a poster of Sirius Black.

She knows what she's doing.

* * *

><p>She's climbing down into the common room after a potions lesson when she hears familiar voices floating up the stairs.<p>

"What's going on with you and the Weasley girl, Draco?" Pansy asks, voice shrill with disapproval.

Ginny comes to an abrupt stop, her school books bumping against her hip.

"You've got her trailing around after you like a house elf."

Ginny waits, stupidly, for Malfoy to defend her. To point out that she's on the House Quidditch team. That's she's valuable. That she's _one of them_.

Instead, he drawls, "I know. Isn't it pathetic? You spend five seconds being nice to her and she falls all over herself to be your best friend."

Ginny feels her stomach plummet into her toes as the harsh laughter echoes into the stairwell.

"Did you see the tattoo?" Pansy asks. "I can't believe she let you do that. She must be desperate."

They all laugh again, Malfoy's sniveling sound right in the middle of it.

"Let me guess, Draco," a high, nasally voice Ginny identifies as Blaise Zabini says. "You have plans for her." She can't see his lecherous smile, but it's all there in his voice.

"Can you imagine?" Malfoy responds with a scoff. "Snogging Weasel's tiny baby sister? It would _destroy_ him."

There's more laughter ringing throughout the space, and Ginny abruptly turns, wanting to slap her hands to her ears. She feels like sliding down the wall, collapsing onto the steps, but knows that if she does that, she may never get back up again.

She supposes this is what gravity winning really feels like.

Smita touches her arm, and Ginny jerks under the touch. She doesn't need the reminder that her humiliation has an audience. The hand only grows more insistent though, so Ginny forces herself to look up.

Smita looks straight at her. No pity, no amusement. "I'm hungry," she says like this is just another boring History of Magic class. "You?"

Ginny stares back at her in utter numbness.

Smita's hand tugs at her arm, and Ginny lets herself get pulled away.

They eat in silence.

* * *

><p>Quidditch isn't fun anymore, and that's the biggest insult of all.<p>

Malfoy still drawls her name in the halls, winking at her on the Quidditch pitch, and she's ashamed to admit she doesn't do anything about it. She doesn't stop to talk like she would have before or anything, but neither does she tell him off.

She doesn't let herself think too hard about why.

Instead she puts on a brave face during the day and carries on like nothing has changed. At night, she learns to swallow her tears like another weakness. Learns to swallow them and not choke. She finds herself reaching for her trunk sometimes, for pages that aren't there and only ends up hating herself even more for the impulse.

She never wanted to feel like a ghost again, no matter how much easier it might be.

"You know," Smita says one day while she's pounding a tentaculus pod to paste with a steady _thud, thud, thud_. Her voice is as close to sharp as Ginny has ever heard it. "Lucius Malfoy was sacked from the Board of Governors over the summer."

Ginny's eyes swivel to her, her fuzzy brain trying to figure out just what that is supposed to mean. What does she care about Lucius Malfoy?

Smita shrugs. "I'm just saying."

At dinner, Ginny sits a few spaces down from Malfoy, close enough to watch, but not close enough to talk. She watches his normal calm assurance, his inherent aura of superiority, but she thinks there's something right underneath. Something that makes her think of those screaming posters of Sirius Black again.

She watches him laze his way through practices, but hears the way he constantly brings up the brooms, his father. Brings them up far too often.

She notices a lot of things now that she's bothering to look.

In potions, Ginny turns to Smita, pulling up her sleeve to bare the green stain on her wrist. "Do you think you could help me get rid of this?"

Smita gives her a long assessing look. Eventually she nods. "Yeah. I can try that."

Ginny considers that maybe she's had an ally she never noticed before.

Despite everything they come up with though, they can't remove the tattoo. It remains stubbornly inked in place. Like a reminder, Ginny thinks.

But Smita does help her learn to magic the alcohol from her cup before drinking it without saying a single word. ("NEWTs level magic," Smita says with a hard gleam in her eye that Ginny is beginning to find intensely comforting.) The team simply begins to compliment her on her ability to handle her drink.

She smiles and tugs her sleeve down lower over her wrist.

* * *

><p>Most days Ginny can't decide if she's more angry with Malfoy or with herself. How stupid has she been?<p>

At practice, she imagines flinging his father's precious broom to his feet as if it is nothing to her, a mere trifle. She would raise an eyebrow, hand on one hip like an old friend returning to roost. "There aren't enough brooms in the world, Malfoy," she imagines saying, the rest of the team looking on.

She is too good to dismiss, she reminds herself. She is too important to victory, and this is another sort of power. She is a much better chaser than Malfoy is a seeker. And it's with that realization that she begins to understand that Malfoy's sudden acceptance of her had as much to do with her Chamber of Secrets fame as his father's loss of position. Malfoy needs _her_, not the other way around.

He wouldn't be able to do anything about her rejection, his face burning scarlet as they walked out onto the pitch.

She closes her eyes and imagines it with triumphant clarity.

Only she doesn't do any of those things. Instead, when the time comes for their next match, she waits until the rest of the team has shuffled outside and carefully places her Nimbus 2001 back in the equipment trunks. There is a sharp little pain in her chest as she lets the shiny, smooth handle go, but she forgets it quickly as she plucks up an old familiar Cleansweep, the wood rough under her palm.

This weightlessness she feels has nothing to do with broom-make.

Ginny scores twelve goals and watches with grim satisfaction as the Hufflepuff seeker flies circles around Malfoy. Fancy brooms are not all they are stacked up to be, it seems.

She tosses a startled Cedric Diggory a brilliant smile as she steaks past and laughs loudly into the wind. This is better than belonging. It might even be better than winning. Ginny swerves towards the goal posts, determined to do her best to keep them ahead.

In the end though, it's Diggory who grabs the snitch while Malfoy is dawdling on the wrong end of the pitch.

Ginny touches down as the stands empty out. Hufflepuff celebrates loudly in the middle of the field.

"Great flying, Ginny," Harry says as he passes by with a gaggle of Gryffindors.

She's got mud in her teeth and sweaty hair plastered to her neck, but she doesn't much care. She's not a little girl with a butter dish on her elbow anymore. "Thanks," is all she says.

He doesn't linger. The next match is between the two of them for the championship, after all. And Ginny has no intention of losing that too.

Fred and George stop by as well, but mostly just to ask her if she's lost her bloody mind, willingly giving up a Nimbus 2001 for an old school-owned Cleansweep. She just smiles and lets them think what they want. She doesn't expect them to understand. How could they? Their lives have always been exactly what they expected them to be.

She supposes that makes them lucky.

Malfoy is smart enough to notice something has shifted, that his gift has been thrown back in his face, even if only metaphorically. But as she suspected, he can't do anything about it. Not when he'd failed to catch the snitch and she'd nearly single-handedly made up the difference.

Still, he and his cronies start sneering at her across the breakfast table. At least it's honest, she thinks.

She smiles back at them like this is nothing and helps herself to a second plate of eggs. Flint flops down next to Ginny and starts arguing with Bletchley over what new drills they are going to have to integrate into practice if they are going to beat Gryffindor. Double practices all next week, he declares.

"What do you think, Six?" he asks her.

They don't seem to care what broom Ginny flies, as long as she keeps scoring. She lifts her chin. "I'm up for it," she says.

Still, nothing feels quite the same anymore. She can see the cracks now, hear the hollow ring of people only saying what they think people want to hear.

She convinces herself this is a lesson well learned.

* * *

><p>They don't win the match against Gryffindor.<p>

It's strange to look across the pitch and see two brothers and an old childhood crush on the other side. She thinks, before her first few goals, her brothers may have been going easy on her. That didn't last after the first time she unerringly slammed a Quaffle home past Wood.

Still, in the end it comes down to the simple fact that Gryffindor outplays them. And Harry Potter once against claims the snitch while Malfoy plays the fool.

The Gryffindor are in a triumphant dogpile in the middle of the pitch, Harry lost somewhere under the tangle. Malfoy is glaring at them a few feet away, brushing his hair back from his face with jerky motions. Defeat doesn't look good on him.

He catches her watching him, his expression hardening and she raises one eyebrow at him, her eyes deliberately straying to his broom. The insult is clear. His face flushes, and Ginny turns away, falling in step with a cursing Flint.

Losing sucks. Ginny can't deny it. But she thinks as Smita meets her at the edge of the pitch, that at least she's beginning to see things for what they really are. That has to be worth it. Right? (But, oh, does it have to _hurt_ this much?)

"Sorry you lost," Smita says in that particular way of hers (not cold, Ginny is realizing, just _steady_).

Ginny shrugs. "There's always next year."

Smita nods and mentions a rune she thinks Ginny might be able to carve into the handle of her broom for better rapid deceleration.

Ginny smiles. This time, she thinks she may actually mean it.

* * *

><p>The rest of the term passes in a flurry of exams and farewells and a mass murderer breaking out of the castle (on a <em>hippogriff<em>, of all things, if school rumor is to be at all believed). Ginny wonders sometimes just how close she'd come to finding herself face to face with Sirius Black in a dark corridor, what she might have done in that situation.

She gets a sick little thrill in her stomach at the thought. She's still pretty sure she has questions, just no idea why she thinks he may have the answers.

Ron is back out of the infirmary before she even gets a chance to go visit him. When she does manage to track him down in the halls between classes the last day, he, Harry, and Hermione are even more tight-lipped and inscrutable than usual.

She's risking making them all late for class by flagging them down, but it's not like Ginny can just pop on down to the Gryffindor common room to make sure Ron is okay.

"What?" Ron complains, impatience clear in his voice. Annoyance at his stupid kid sister.

She holds back her flinch, hand compulsively pulling her sleeve down lower over her wrist. (Oh, _Merlin_, one of these days she is going to have to wear a short sleeve and then life is going to get really loud if Molly Weasley has anything to do with it.)

"I'm just glad you're okay, Ron," she mumbles in a rush, tucking her books into her chest and turning back down the way she came.

She hears the solid smack of hand against flesh and a disgruntled "Ow!" from Ron, but doesn't turn back to look.

Ginny spends the train ride to London sitting next to Smita. A few first year Slytherin girls sit across from them, their eyes nervous as they goad each other with silent communication. Clearly they are here on a dare of some sort. The bold one of the group finally manages to speak about an hour into the trip, and Ginny braces herself for inquiries about Malfoy, about the Chamber, about her stupid Gryffindor brothers.

"You're the first girl on the Slytherin Quidditch team in over a decade," the girl says in a rush.

Ginny frowns. "Really?" She hadn't actually even noticed. If she had, she wonders if she still would have had the nerve to try out.

The three girls nod in unison, staring at her, not like a freak or an outsider or even a _girl_, but like she's a…hero.

"Well," Ginny says, swallowing against the discomfort rising in her throat. "It's probably about time that changed then."

"Yes," the bold one says with a glimmer in her eye that Ginny recognizes all too well.

Next to her, Smita's shoulder casually bumps against hers. "Hey," she says, nodding towards the passing trolley, the tiniest hint of something that only on Smita would be considered a smile. "I'm hungry. You?"

Ginny bites the inside of her lip. "Yeah," she agrees. "Me too."

The rest of the trip does not pass in silence.

Maybe, Ginny thinks, this is what belonging is really supposed to feel like.

* * *

><p>Back at the Burrow, Ginny kneels on the edge of her mother's garden. The sun is warm on the back of her neck, her hands cool in the dark soil.<p>

A shadow falls over her, and she looks up to see Ron standing over her. She lifts an eyebrow, surprised to see him. Of all her family, it's always been with him that she feels the greatest tension, the greatest distance, like he can't quite bring himself to forgive her for the treasonous act of being sorted a Slytherin.

But now, in the summer sun, he kneels next to her in the dirt and says, "How are you, Gin?" in a soft, confused voice that makes her ache in unexpected places. He may not be the most emotionally enlightened boy in the world, but he's the sort to always rectify things when he finally figures it out, not matter how much it costs.

She wonders what's changed.

"I'm good," she says, partly because she believes it will be true someday and partly because she knows this is what he needs to hear.

Ron nods, yanking up a marigold in his distraction. The tension hasn't quite left his shoulders yet. He hasn't talked much about what happened that day he broke his leg, the day Sirius Black escaped from Hogwarts, no matter how much Fred and George harass him for details. She has some ideas though, what that might have been like.

"I'm sorry about Scabbers," she says.

Ron's face blanches, but it's not grief, rather something a bit like disgust. He recovers after a moment, clearing his throat. "Yeah, well, he was old."

She's long since learned to see through his bluster to the affection hidden underneath—a little sister's prerogative—but this is something different than indifference towards a careworn hand me down.

She stops him from mangling another of their Mum's beloved marigolds. "Ron?"

He looks at her, blinking slightly as if surprised to still see her there. He grimaces, shaking his head. "It's just… It's strange the way things aren't always what they seem, innit?"

It's really the last thing she expects to hear from him, but so close to her own thoughts these days that she can't help the feeling of kinship.

"Except Malfoy," she says, a peace offering of sorts. One thing they can agree on.

He doesn't react right away, as if expecting a trap, but then a smile slowly spreads over his face. "Yeah," he says. "He's pretty much exactly the git he seems."

They laugh together, and for a moment it's like that last year when it was just the two of them left at the Burrow. His shoulder bumps hers, and she kicks her feet out, leaning back on her arm next to him. They sit like that for a while, just enjoying the sun, chore momentarily forgotten.

Ginny glances up at the white ball of fluff that is never far from Ron's side these days, much to his seeming annoyance. He still hasn't explained how the bird managed to just randomly adopt him. "Have you named your owl yet?"

Ron glances up, automatically scowling at the owl. "No."

She peers at the owl for a moment, pretending to think hard. "Pigwidgeon."

"What?" he asks, frowning at her.

"Pigwidgeon," she repeats. "It's perfect."

The owl chirps and loops above Ron's head in approval.

"Pigwidgeon?" he repeats in horror. He glances up at the owl nearly vibrating with pleasure above them. "Bloody hell, Gin!"

Ginny laughs, pushing to her feet and tripping down the slope of the garden, the newly christened owl hooting in her wake.

She doesn't stumble.


	3. Year Three

_**Third Year**_

There is only one week left of summer when Molly Weasley finally notices her daughter's tattoo.

Ginny had just begun to feel like maybe she'd got away with it. She'd made a trip down to Ottery St. Catchpole at the beginning of the summer, wandering into the Muggle cornershop with a stolen handful of her father's Muggle currency. Foundation, the potion-like substance was called.

She'd grown complacent, between her long sleeves and the sticky flesh-colored substance. The weather has turned hot though, the sheen of sweat on her skin betraying the green lines as she reaches for the butter.

All movement at the table stops until Molly Weasley shrieks, "Ginevra Weasley, what is that?"

Fred and George are the first out their seats, sending her awed looks back over their shoulders as they go, as if she has pulled off the greatest single piece of misbehavior ever. Percy clucks his tongue in dour disapproval and goes straight upstairs, mumbling something sanctimonious about cauldron thickness as he flees. Only Ron hesitates, as if their newly forged truce requires it, but no amount of sibling accord can stand in the face of Molly Weasley at full volume.

He shoots her an apologetic glance and ducks out into the garden after the twins.

Ginny doesn't see any point in bluffing at this point, lifting her chin and letting her sleeve fall further back. "It's a tattoo," she says calmly (or petulantly, more like, the words tumbling out as if saying that only an idiot wouldn't know that).

Her father's eyes narrow at her tone, but Mum jumps in before he can get a word in edge-wise. The ear-splitting complaints range from _unladylike_ and _long-term consequences_ to _irresponsibility_ and _had she completely lost her mind?_

Ginny lets the rant wash over her, reflecting that Howlers really have nothing on her mum. She takes a moment as her ears ring to be thankful for the acres of space around their house, and the fact that neither Hermione nor Harry have arrived yet. The last thing she needs is an audience for this.

It only becomes unbearable when she makes the mistake of glancing at her father, finding him staring at her pale-faced as if she is a stranger, like she has disappointed him in some fundamental way she doesn't even understand.

Her own expression falters, bravado leaking away. She blinks back against the unexpected prick of tears, tugging at the edge of her sleeve. The words are on the tip of her tongue now, the _it wasn't my choice_ and _you don't understand_.

Ginny looks away. She's not going to blame someone else for it, not when it had been her own damn fault.

"You are staying home from the Quidditch match!" Mum yells.

Ginny's mouth drops open, discomfort forgotten. "Mum!"

Only Dad's hand on her shoulder keeps Ginny from beginning to shriek in indignation herself. They can't not let her go to the World Cup. They _can't_!

"Ginny," Dad says, voice quiet and infinitely calm in the face of Mum's ringing anger. "Please go outside while your mother and I discuss this."

Ginny stomps outside, leaving her parents to discuss their most wayward child. With an irritated huff, she sinks down on the top step.

Ron comes to stand next to her after a while, staring out over the pasture. "Who?" he asks.

Ron may be stupid and clueless about a lot of things, but he's close enough in age to know that second years rarely come up with the idea of tattooing themselves on their own.

Ginny folds her arms around her knees, pulling them up into her chest.

Ron's mouth tightens, pressing into a thin line, and she knows she doesn't even have to say the name. "Right," he says.

He goes back inside, closing the door with enough careful deliberation that Ginny winces.

She can't help but think she's thrown another log onto an already raging fire.

* * *

><p>There's no more talk of tattoos and punishments, but mostly only because Hermione arrives the next afternoon.<p>

Ginny is relieved to see her. Not because they are close friends or anything, but because Hermione's brought her parents along the first evening, so Ginny knows there won't be any more scenes. Her mum can continue to slam food down in front of Ginny and level her most disappointed stares, but she won't yell. They have to be pleasant in front of the nervous Muggles, prove that leaving their daughter here for the rest of the summer isn't a completely crazy idea.

It's Hermione's first time here, so while the adults have tea in the parlor, Ron takes Hermione around on a tour. Ginny watches him as he leads her around, his eyes wary as if scared of what she'll think of the place. Right up until Hermione nearly crawls into a bush trying to get a closer look at a garden gnome. Then she watches Ron shove his hands into his pockets as he watches Hermione, shaking his head in seeming exasperation. Ginny doesn't miss the smile hiding underneath.

At dinner, Ginny ends up sitting next to Mr. Granger. In many ways he looks exactly like she'd expect a Muggle to. He's wearing a nice suit and button up shirt that manages to not look anywhere near as fussy as Percy's ministry getups these days. He cuts his food into small, even pieces and chews thoughtfully, even when he's trying to pretend he hasn't seem Mum float more rolls over from the pantry.

Ginny would expect her father to keep Mr. Granger busy with an endless litany of embarrassing questions, but tonight he's oddly quiet. Enough so that Mr. Granger looks a little lonely with only his plate to entertain him. Ginny takes a careful sip of water and asks Mr. Granger what exactly a dentist is.

Mr. Granger smiles and explains his job in simple terms, not like she's stupid, but more like he's gratified by her curiosity. He tries to make a joke that goes way over her head, though to judge from Hermione's expression, it probably wasn't funny even if it hadn't. Ginny smiles anyway, noticing the way Mrs. Granger looks at her husband with exasperated affection, something she's seen on her mother's face her entire life.

Ginny decides that Mr. Granger is probably a pretty good father.

When it's time to clear the table, Ginny takes Mr. Granger's plate, finding her Dad watching her as she does.

Later that evening, he pokes his head in Ginny's room as she and Hermione are going to bed. "Do you have everything you need girls?"

"Yes," Hermione says. "Thank you, Mr. Weasley."

Dad smiles at her, patting the foot of the camp bed a bit awkwardly before moving over to Ginny's bedside. His fingers fiddle with her covers, and Ginny wants to remind him that he hasn't tucked her in for years, but lets him do it all the same.

He sits on the edge of her bed and lowers his voice. "Your mother and I decided that you can still go to the match."

Ginny's heart leaps up into her throat. "Thank you!" she says, throwing herself at him and hugging him. "Thank you, thank you!"

His arms tighten around her.

* * *

><p>Ginny Weasley is at the World Cup.<p>

The. World. Cup. Watching the final match between Bulgaria and Ireland.

It's the most exciting thing that has ever happened to her. (She supposes there was a time she would have thought first laying eyes on the famous Harry Potter was more exciting, but she's not quite that young and silly any more. And besides, he's standing next to her, gaping around at the stadium with as much awe as she feels.)

She never thought she could be lucky enough to see the Quidditch match to end all Quidditch matches in person. Bill and Charlie are no doubt still green with envy, stuck as they are abroad. They were even more jealous when they heard their seats are in the top box along with the ministers. (This is the part Percy seems to care the most about, Quidditch a mere afterthought. Ginny can't help but think that Charlie would have appreciated it all so much more.)

As for Ginny, she would have been content to sit on the grass far, far below and break her neck trying to squint up at the distant players streaking above. Anything just to be near this match and these players. The box and its illustrious inhabitants are more distraction than bonus.

"It's bigger than the bloody Burrow," Ron mutters, tinkering with the set of Omnioculars Harry bought him.

"I imagine most things are," a snide voice remarks.

It seems they are to have company in the top box. Ron, Harry, and Hermione turn on the newly arrived Draco Malfoy almost as a unit, and it's hard to say which face betrays the greatest amount of animosity among the four of them.

Draco hasn't come alone, however, his parents a few steps behind.

Ginny feels her body go cold.

Lucius Malfoy's eyes sweep across them, not lingering on Ginny as he makes some snide remark to her father that she can't quite make out over the buzzing building in her ears. When Mr. Malfoy does turn his attention away from her dad, it's only to stare at Hermione like she's a bug, a disgusting smell he just walked past.

_Mudblood._

Ginny flinches, but Hermione holds firm, refusing to look away from the frank stare Mr. Malfoy is giving her.

Ron and Harry have already tensed, ready to jump into the fray, but it's Ginny who finds herself shuffling closer to Hermione as if to shield her somehow. (Like she could do anything against a full-grown wizard, and an evil one at that.) She really accomplishes nothing more than drawing attention to herself.

Mr. Malfoy's eyes land on her like he's only just noticed her, like it even takes him a minute to figure out who she is. She is nothing to him. Less than that. It's a painful realization, this evidence of just how casually he condemned her to Tom Riddle's ceaseless whisper years before without giving her a second thought.

"Ah, yes," he says, his eyes glacial. "The youngest Weasley. You play Quidditch with Draco, if I recall." He glances up at her father. "In Slytherin." His lips curl as if this fact fundamentally proves something.

Ginny wonders if it does.

Her Dad's hand presses down on her shoulder, warm and comforting. "We're very proud of her," he says, an edge of fierceness under his calm tone. "She's said to be the best player on her team, despite her age."

Draco flushes, his father's lips pulling back from his teeth with distaste. She wonders if he is more pained by the slight to his son, or the fact that he can't really defend his woeful Quidditch skills.

Harry unexpectedly pipes in. "She's brilliant," he agrees, though it's probably more a dig at Draco than a compliment to her.

Ludo Bagman blunders in then before things can become more tense, his glistening, child-like face split wide with excitement.

"Let's get the match started!" he says with a clap of his hands.

Ginny turns and blindly heads for the front of the box, leaning hard against the railing. Staring down over the writhing crowd, she lets the swoop of vertigo shake the crawling itch of the Malfoys' presence off her skin.

"Ginny?" Hermione asks, appearing next to her and looking for all the world as if there aren't people who hate her standing a few feet away. Ginny wants to know how she can do that.

"Here come the mascots," Ron shouts, pointing.

In the rush to get the best view, Ginny ends up wedged in between Harry and Hermione, enveloped in the group. It feels surprisingly nice.

Once the match starts, the noise of the crowd is deafening, even in the top box. Ginny forgets Malfoy's glare boring into her back in the face of the glitter and energy and soaring excitement of the two best Quidditch teams in the world squaring off against each other. She won't let them ruin this.

The Bulgarian seeker drops in a dive unlike anything she has ever seen before, and she and Harry are plastered up to the rail side by side, knuckles white.

"Did you _see_ that?" she shrieks.

Harry lets out a whoop. "I know! That was _amazing_!"

His shoulder remains pressed against her the rest of the game, the hum of excitement from his body like the feel of a broom under her palms. Hermione occasionally grabs Ginny's other arm, tugging on it with an excited squeal.

Ginny bounces in her toes and lets out a shout as Moran swoops and feints, sliding the quaffle home with an aching sort of grace.

_Yes_, Ginny thinks. _One day this will be me._

The moment the match ends, everything becomes a blur of Quidditch stars and trophies and celebrations.

They talk it out for hours after, just how Krum pulled off that move, how he had been brave enough to end the game on his own terms. Hermione looks on with bemusement while Fred and George dance triumphant jigs around Ron. Harry leans across Ginny, his hand cutting a tight arc through the air as if to work out the specifics of a new technique. He half-trips over a root in his eagerness, and Ginny laughs as she grabs his arm to steady him.

"You may need to work on that one," she comments.

Harry shoots her a sheepish grin and joins in with Fred and George's mocking serenade of Ron.

Leaning her head back to look at the stars, Ginny thinks this must be one of those perfect moments that should be bottled up in a little glass jar and kept forever.

Too perfect.

She's barely managed to close her eyes and dream of heart-stopping dives and the feel of a warm arm next to hers when screams and chaos shatter the night, sweeping them all up into a nightmare.

Wedged between Fred and George in the pitch-black, Ginny feels just how small she is, the sweep of panicked crowds on either side as the faceless wizards torture the Muggles like a little kid pulling the legs off a spider. She grips her wand in her pocket, but knows her small catalog of hexes won't save her.

She stares up at the skull and snake floating in the air like a stain and tries to remember to breathe.

Even when dawn comes, everyone safely back home and away from the danger, it feels like something has changed, like the chaos was a signal the grown-ups were just waiting for.

_Death Eaters_.

Ginny feels it in the way they look at her.

_There's never been a witch or wizard who went bad that didn't come from Slytherin_.

They're all thinking it. They just aren't brave enough to say it. (And isn't _that_ ironic?)

She takes the stairs two a time and disappears up into her room.

* * *

><p>Ginny's room feels like an oven. It's like the weather is doing its best to add to the already tense atmosphere. In some small attempt to cool down, she's wrestling her hair up into a pony tail.<p>

Hermione eases into the room like she's going to apologize yet again for taking up some of Ginny's precious space, a dance they already played the first night. Everything feels reset though now, like nothing can be taken for granted.

Ginny isn't so stupid not to know why.

She'd finally worked it out, that horrified stare her father had given her upon first seeing her tattoo, finally understood as she stared up at a green stain in the sky with screams of fear on all sides. She knows why he'd watched so closely as she spoke to Mr. Granger.

Even if she'd somehow managed to forget it, here it is again on Hermione's face as she stares at Ginny's exposed tattoo.

Ginny drops her arms, cursing that she hadn't thought to wear long sleeves despite the crushing heat.

Hermione doesn't say anything, slipping into her camp bed.

Ginny douses the light and follows suit.

They don't say goodnight. Ginny isn't sure how much time passes, just feels thoughts and unspoken words heavy in the air between them.

"I don't agree with them," Ginny blurts when she can't stand it any more. She keeps her eyes trained on the anemic flutter of the curtains above her. "Just so you know."

Hermione doesn't ask what she doesn't agree with, or even whom. Slytherins? Death Eaters? Are they the same? Ginny's scared to look for differences and not find any. The memories of careless and cutting words are far too clear.

_Sticks and stones_, she thinks.

Hermione still hasn't said anything, and Ginny begins to hope that maybe she's is asleep and they won't have to have this conversation. She chances a glance. Hermione's eyes are wide open as she stares at the ceiling, sweat plastering strands of hair to her forehead.

"I didn't assume-," Hermione starts to say. "I mean, it doesn't-. Really, it's not-."

Ginny flinches with each unfinished, fractured thought.

Hermione lets out a frustrated breath and swings her feet to the ground. "It's hot," she announces, like this is root of all the world's problems.

Ginny feels the bizarre urge to laugh, biting down on a snide remark about the brilliant deduction. Did you read about that in _Hogwarts: A History_?

Hermione gives Ginny a wry glance. Ginny has to remember that Hermione is perfectly familiar with the Weasley temperament.

"I could braid your hair," Ginny says.

Hermione looks surprised.

"It would be cooler," Ginny explains.

"Okay," Hermione says, holding her gaze, and it feels like more than a simple agreement.

They sit near the windowsill, bodies turned towards the non-existent breeze. Ginny clumsily works through plaits of Hermione's hair and waits for Hermione to speak. She swears she can hear the thoughts clanking around in Hermione's head.

"I don't like brooms," Hermione announces after a while.

Ginny frowns. She leans to one side, noticing that Hermione is staring hard at a poster of Gwenog Jones. It's possible she's trying to apologize for not being as into Quidditch as the rest of them are. Harry and Ron must give her a hard time about that from time to time.

"I see," Ginny says. Lack of interest in Quidditch may be unfathomable to Ginny, but it's hardly a capital offense.

"Do you?" Hermione asks, turning her head. She doesn't so much look embarrassed or apologetic as determined. "I'm supposed to be _brave_, aren't I? But I'm terrified of brooms."

Ginny feels her chest tighten, like someone just chucked a Quaffle into her solar plexus.

"Ginny?" Hermione asks, trying to turn further around and wincing.

Ginny realizes her fingers are tighten in Hermione's hair. She forces her hands to relax.

"Well," Ginny says, swallowing past the thickness in her throat. "While we're confessing things, there's something about me you should probably know."

"Yeah?" Hermione says warily.

"Yeah. I'm completely rubbish at braiding."

Hermione blinks, looking like an owl, before she laughs.

Breathing out, Ginny finishes Hermione's terrible, crooked braid.

They sit on the sill together until the moon rises up and out of sight, a cool breeze finally fighting its way up over the pond.

* * *

><p>September the first is always a day of chaos in the Burrow.<p>

Mum is flitting back and forth between rooms and the kitchen and the washing lines out in the yard as usual. But as Ginny packs the last few things in her trunk, Mum is moving around her room, straightening her bedding even though it's already been made and remade twice. Ginny recognizes hovering when she sees it.

Fred and George come in to help Hermione get her trunk down the stairs, leaving just Ginny and her still fiddling mother.

"Mum?" Ginny dares to ask. Things have been less frosty between them since Ginny almost got herself trampled by dark wizards, but no less strained.

"What?" she says, seeming surprised to find them alone. "Oh, yes." She compulsively straightens the pillows on Ginny's bed again.

"I'm almost done," Ginny says.

"Good." She looks like she wants to say something more, but instead pulls something out of the pocket of her apron. She presses a cool jar into Ginny's hand. "Secrecy Salve," she says, looking awkward. "It will work much better than that Muggle makeup."

Ginny wants to say she's sorry, but she doesn't even know what she's apologizing for any more.

Mum gives her a brief squeeze and disappears out into the hall.

Ginny tucks the jar safely into her trunk.

* * *

><p>Hogwarts.<p>

She's glad to be back, ready to throw herself into things that are simple and predictable, like classes and Quidditch. Even the confusing minefield that is her House's common room offers a sort of familiarity at least. This she can handle.

Only Hogwarts decides to do to her what it does best: pulls the rug out from under her feet. There isn't going to be any Quidditch this year. Just two more classloads of strangers to be wary of and an archaic tournament she can't participate in anyway.

Honor and glory? She's more interested in _surviving_.

Next to her, Flint's fist smacks the table, a goblet of pumpkin juice jumping. "What a fucking waste."

Ginny flinches, but reminds herself that this is even worse for him in some ways, being a seventh year and the team captain. That would piss her off too. "I take it you aren't going to put your name in the Goblet," she says.

He glances over at her as if surprised to see her. He lets out a humorless huff of air. "Yeah, Six. I think that's pretty safe to say." His brow furrows, and Ginny can feel herself changing in his eyes from chaser to useless third year.

He pushes to his feet. "See you around, Weasley," he says, moving down to the table to talk to some other seventh years.

Just like that, she's back to square one. Another first night spent lying in bed staring at her curtains with a long year stretching ahead of her.

Only then Smita climbs up on the foot of Ginny's bed, clearly not willing to be put off by the black cloud hanging over Ginny's head. She's cut her hair, the dark strands now curling just below her chin. "How was your summer?" she asks.

Ginny shakes her head, only able now to think how it ended, the good days faded from memory. "A disaster. You?"

Smita's nose crinkles with distaste. "Cousins. _Lots_ of them."

They stare at each other a moment, expressions perfectly mirroring long-suffering annoyance. Then Smita's lip twitches, and Ginny starts to laugh. Laughs long and hard until her stomach begins to ache with something other than disappointment.

They draw the curtains and sit in the cocoon of Ginny's bed, talking until the wee hours of the morning, Smita's weight heavy against her legs.

Ginny decides that maybe square one won't be quite so bad after all.

* * *

><p>For a while, classes and new subjects are substitute enough for Quidditch. Smita is still trying to convince Ginny that Ancient Runes was a much better choice than Care of Magical Creatures. Despite how much she'd love to be outdoors, Ginny is convinced enough when other students in their year start appearing back in the castle with singed fingers and sooty faces. At least Professor Babbling's lessons rarely lead to physical injury. Besides, as much as Ginny hates to admit it, runes <em>are<em> pretty interesting.

In exchange, Ginny strong-armed Smita into Muggle Studies for their second elective. Probably because she knows it will make her Dad happy and she's looking forward to having things to write to him about. Things he can relate to.

Professor Burbage pulls her aside at the end of the first day of class. "You're Arthur Weasley's daughter, aren't you?"

Ginny looks up into her smooth, kind face and nods. "Yes, Professor."

She smiles. "Would you tell him hello for me? We did a great deal of work together on the Muggle Protection Act. He's a very dedicated, very kind man."

"Of course, Professor," Ginny says, feeling her face flush. She knows her father isn't a Ministry big shot. Far from it, really. She isn't embarrassed by that, she's just heard her mother complain far too often over the years that he doesn't get the credit he deserves. Dad doesn't seem to care, but it still makes Ginny feel warm inside to hear someone say such nice things about him, to see the things Ginny admires in him.

Burbage touches her arm. "I'm glad you're taking my class, Miss Weasley." She says this like she knows exactly why Ginny is here, knows it has less to do with her father than she'd like to think.

Ginny gnaws on her lip, and mumbles something about not wanting to be late for her next class.

Burbage doesn't single her out again, or treat her any differently than any of the other students, and Ginny's glad. She decides she likes Burbage, who talks about Muggles not like they are the enemy or even wayward pets, but _people_. (Though Ginny still isn't convinced those areoplane things Muggles travel around in can possibly be safe. She'll stick to brooms and floo powder, thank you very much.)

There's only one other Slytherin in the class with them, a boy called Tobias. Despite the fact that Ginny and Smita have had all their classes with him since first year, they've never spoken. In the end, he's the one to approach them. Class has just ended, the typical chatter of post-lecture freedom filling the room.

Tobias leans a hip against the edge of Ginny's desk, his sandy hair falling into his eyes. "They all want to know what the Heir of Slytherin is doing taking Muggle Studies, in case you're wondering," he announces.

Ginny's trying to figure out if he is mocking her or if people honestly still associate her with the Chamber. She glances around at the other students, most of them looking hastily away. She feels her face flush.

"What, this isn't the class where we learn how best to season Muggles before we eat them?" she snaps.

A few heads nearby whip around so fast that Ginny worries for their necks. Tobias simply looks surprised, his eyebrows lifting. "No," he says with calm seriousness. "I think that must be some other class."

Ginny blinks at him, wondering what his problem is. It's annoying to realize she's just as confused by his presence in this class as the others are about hers.

"What other elective are you two taking?" he asks. "The care and tenderizing of magical creatures?" His lips twitch, and Ginny realizes he's trying really hard not to laugh.

"Merlin," Ginny curses, shaking her head and letting out a breath.

Smita's eyes widen. "She didn't mean-."

"He knows, Smita," Ginny says, touching her arm. "He's just having a nice go at us." Teasing her, really. And not the vicious kind she would expect. It's kind of confusing.

Tobias presses his hand against his chest like he's taking some sort of oath, and she's beginning to wonder if he's incapable of taking anything seriously. "I would never." He jerks his head towards the door. "Come on. Maybe we'll learn something useful about basting in Potions."

Ginny rolls her eyes, but grabs her books and follows Tobias out into the hall. "I suppose we are all going the same place."

"That's the spirit," Tobias says, holding the door open for Smita. "We poor, outnumbered Slytherins need to stick together, after all."

Ginny frowns, wondering what he means by that, but his attention has already turned to asking Smita if she thinks Muggle pets can really be as useless as they sound.

To Ginny's surprise, Smita quirks her head and starts telling them both about a dog her father had as a child that her Muggle grandfather had taught to carry in the newspaper each morning.

She isn't quite sure which shocks her most, that Smita isn't a pureblood (aren't all Slytherins supposed to be purebloods?), or that she's talking with Tobias. _Chatting_, even.

When they get to Potions, Tobias leaves them to join his friends across the dungeon, and Smita notices the look on her face. "What?"

Ginny stows her bag and pulls out her cauldron, a grin playing at her lips. "Nothing. Nothing at all."

* * *

><p>The weeks begin to slide by with greater and greater speed. Ginny still misses Quidditch more than she can properly express, feels a little lost without it. But she likes her classes and she has Smita to talk to. Even Tobias is pretty amusing from time to time, when he isn't being a complete berk.<p>

Though by the time the Durmstrang and Beauxbatons students arrive at the end of October, Ginny is already sick of the Triwizard Tournament. It's all people have been talking about for weeks, and she thinks if she hears the phrase 'honor and glory' one more time she's going to lose it.

Though seeing her brothers get knocked back by the Goblet's Age Line sporting matching grandfather beards is almost worth all the fuss and bother. Almost.

Only then things take a turn for the worse.

Sitting in the Great Hall on Halloween, Ginny thinks that she should have seen this coming: Harry Potter getting himself swept up in the middle of everything, rules be damned.

For about half a second she believes it. Believes Harry Potter has been stupid and brash and arrogant enough to bend all the rules to his fame, but then she turns to stare at him like everyone else. She sees it, the way he flinches back as if wishing he could melt into the very woodwork itself. This isn't guilt, Ginny recognizes, having seen more than her fair share of it growing up. It's something more like…terror. It makes her think of a battered boy staring across ink-stained stones at her, the feel of a shoulder against hers as brooms sped through the air.

Harry sends a panicked look to Ron as he flounders, but her brother is looking at the floor, his ears tinged red enough to be seen all the way from where Ginny is sitting. Hermione has to shove Harry to get him moving.

He looks so small, walking up the aisle towards Dumbledore between the rows of fully grown Beauxbatons and Durmstrang students. Ginny bites down on her lip and watches his progress, trying to pretend that she doesn't see that Dumbledore looks more worried than a wizard of his power and position has the right to.

Once Harry disappears out the door after the other champions, the hall erupts into chatter, Harry's name floating above the din with varying levels of sharpness and venom.

_Cheater_, they call him. _Glory hound. Full of himself._

Even Rita Skeeter talks about him like that in the papers.

They don't know the real Harry, Ginny thinks, remembering the boy tripping over his own feet in his excitement over something as simple as Quidditch, the way his eyes still grow large over things she's long since learned to take for granted. He may be a lot of things, but she can't quite picture him doing this on purpose.

Over the next weeks, she watches from afar as Harry is ostracized, turned into a walking pariah. She watches the way he tries to pretend it doesn't bother him, knowing with absolute certainty that the other students' vicious scorn is nothing to him next to the desertion of her stupid brother.

She remembers the look on Ron's face as he first showed Hermione around the Burrow. His utter dismay at moldy old dress robes as Harry stood nearby with a brand new set. She'd always silently wondered what it would be like, having someone like Harry Potter as a best friend.

Oh, she understands her brother perfectly well. Well enough to know that no word from her will change anything, or make him understand that abandoning his best mate because of his festering jealousy doesn't make him a hero, just a wanker.

So Ginny doesn't talk to Ron, just walks in the grounds with Hermione occasionally, letting her vent her spleen about the stupidity of boys. She looks exhausted, spending all her time running back and forth between Harry and Ron like an overworked owl. So much so that Ginny wants to smack some sense into both boys. Or hex them. She still hasn't decided.

"I worry about him," Hermione confesses once between classes.

"Ron?" Ginny asks, thinking of her brother's pale and set face, the way he walks around like he's beginning to suspect he wandered down the wrong path but refuses to admit it.

Hermione shakes her head. "Harry. I think he's terrified, but refuses to admit it. Any more than he'll admit that he misses Ron like an amputated arm." She gives Ginny a shaky smile. "They're rather pathetic without each other."

Ginny tries to smile back, thinking that Hermione isn't any happier herself.

Two days later, Draco's stupid badges appear, and Ginny's had enough. She tells Smita that she'll catch up with her and slips down a different hallway. It doesn't take her long to find him, particularly with the swath of open space that seems to float around him these days.

When she gets close enough, she makes a grab for Harry's sleeve. She tries not to notice the way his eyes track to her robes as if expecting to see 'Potter Stinks' blazoned there. She can't blame him for that, not really. It hasn't been all that long since she walked the halls trailing after Draco, forced laughter on her lips.

"Ginny?" he asks, eyes guarded. (Trained to expect the worst from all sides, she thinks.)

She takes a careful breath, jaw tightening. "Ron's a prat."

Harry's eyebrows shoot up in surprise, as if this is the last thing he expects to hear from her.

"But he'll figure it out eventually," she promises. He always does. This is what she needs Harry to understand. That her brother, for all his stupidity, is also honorable to a fault.

Harry tries to smile, but it's just a grimace, and she doesn't blame him. "You think so?" he asks, the tiniest painful bit of hope hiding under his forced humor.

Inexplicably, she feels the urge to give him a slap get replaced with the bizarre impulse to hug him. He is rather pathetic. Instead she squeezes his arm, giving him a bracing grin. "Good luck on the first task. I know you'll do brilliantly."

He doesn't seem quite as optimistic, but still manages a grateful look. "Thanks, Ginny."

She watches him go, knowing she hasn't fixed anything, but hoping maybe he feels a tiny bit better. That maybe Hermione won't have to worry quite as much.

"Aw," a mocking voice drawls. "I think little Weasley has a crush."

Ginny turns, colliding with Draco. Her face flushes, half with anger, half with the embarrassing memory of a stupid little girl struck speechless and clumsy by the very sight of Harry Potter.

Draco seems to take this as all the confirmation he needs. The Weasley's support of Harry is no secret after all. His eyes dart down to her robe, something flinty and frightening taking up residence there. "You've forgotten your badge."

"No, I really haven't," Ginny snaps. She moves to shove past him, but Crabbe and Goyle step across her.

Draco fingers his wand. "Maybe you'd like something a little more permanent?" He grabs her right hand, twisting to expose her wrist. "A matching pair, perhaps?"

Her first year, as unspoken head honcho of the younger students, Draco mostly ignored her. She thinks maybe that was a matter of demonstrating daily that she wasn't even worth his notice. Her second year things changed, her mystique rising in tandem with the Chamber of Secrets scandal and her position on the Quidditch team. But when she had subtly shown that she was not going to be in his pocket, the silent war had begun.

This year, Draco does not seem content with the silent part. She doesn't have Quidditch to lord over him any more, and he's more than aware of it.

All term he's been talking loudly about Ginny's poor family and Muggle-loving father, his stage whisper echoing through the common room. Did everyone hear that she's taking Muggle Studies? Pathetic.

And what has she done about his verbal attacks? Nothing.

Ron, Fred, George…even Harry, they would have already drawn their wands, flown across the room to shut Draco up any way they could. She hasn't.

She isn't her brothers. That probably makes her a coward. (Not a Gryffindor, at the very least.)

Draco's hand tightens around her wrist. "What do you say, Weasley?"

She wrenches away from him as hard as she can, his nails raking against her skin as she escapes. Ducking her head, she dives into the swarm of students, the sound of their laughter following after her.

* * *

><p>"Ginevra," a voice drawls. "Is that a love letter?"<p>

Ginny looks up from her dad's latest letter describing a new plug he'd found at something the Muggles call a 'Swap Meat'. (Though what meat has to do with elektricity, she still doesn't know. She'll have to ask Burbage.) Tobias, sprawled on the Common Room floor with an acre of notes spread around him, is waggling his eyebrows at Ginny.

She rolls her eyes. "Oh, yes. It's from Heathcote Barbary. He wants to take me on tour with him."

Tobias snorts. "Thought you had better musical taste than that." Looking back up over his shoulder, he nudges Smita on the couch behind him. "How can you be friends with her?"

Smita bites her lower lip like she's fighting off a smile and buries her face in her runes book.

Tobias and Ginny share a grin. It seems to have become one of Tobias' greatest ambitions, trying to get Smita to laugh. Ginny wishes him luck with that insurmountable task.

Turning back to her letter, Ginny is interrupted yet again when a badge flies across the room, bouncing off her chest before landing on her lap. 'Potter Stinks,' it announces. She feels her smile fade.

Draco has been quieter in the common room since a seventh year grew tired of his heckling and told him to shut it. But that just means he's always finding new ways to torment her.

Ginny brushes the button off her lap and goes back to her letter as if nothing happened.

Smita sighs. "I wish he'd just…give it up."

Tobias picks up the badge, turning it over in his fingers. "Yeah, well," he says, the badge disappearing into his pocket. "The bloke has to have a hobby."

Ginny wishes he'd find a different one.

"Anyway," Tobias says, scooping up the papers and getting to his feet. "Thanks for letting me look at your notes, Smita." He passes her a giant stack of parchment covered with her careful writing.

To Ginny's endless fascination, Smita's face flushes the slightest bit red. "Sure," she says. "Any time."

Tobias smiles at her, one of his hands scratching at his neck. "Yeah, well, I don't plan on getting the firepox again anytime soon."

The blush on Smita's face deepens, her mouth dropping open. "Oh! I didn't mean-."

Tobias' grin widens. "Course you didn't."

Ginny snorts, both of them turning to look at her.

"What?" Tobias says.

"Nothing," Ginny says. "Nothing at all."

Tobias' eyes narrow at her, promising later retribution. Ginny just smiles pleasantly back.

Tobias shakes his head in defeat. "See you later," he says, abandoning the girls for his more macho guy friends, no doubt.

She watches him cross the common room, her eyes straying over Draco.

He leers at her, and Ginny lifts her letter, the words swimming in front of her.

* * *

><p>At the first challenge, Ginny has to rethink her indifference to the Triwizard Tournament. It may still be a giant imposition and nowhere near as important as Quidditch, but it isn't a total joke. Not to judge from the four enormous dragons waiting to eviscerate the champions.<p>

"They can't be serious," Ginny says, trying very hard not to think of how small Harry looks from the top of the stands.

"Brilliant," Tobias breathes, looking positively giddy at the prospect of carnage.

Smita doesn't offer a comment, just fists her hands against her mouth, eyes wide over her knuckles.

Despite Ginny's misgivings, Cedric and Krum and Fleur do credible jobs. There are only two or three times she's certain someone is going to lose an arm. (She's only slightly disappointed not to see the glamorous Beauxbatons champion lose some of that shiny perfect hair of hers in a stray flash of dragon-breath.)

By the time it's Harry's turn, Ginny's posture closely mirrors Smita's.

Fortunately, Harry doesn't get torn apart or reduced to a Harry-shaped column of ash, but instead faces his dragon (the biggest, meanest one, she's sure) with a blinding sort of courage that she can't help but admire, almost as much as she admires the way his broom becomes an extension of his body.

(She wonders if he misses Quidditch too, or if he's too busy with the not dying and people glaring at him in the halls to bother.)

She sees Ron and Harry later, arms strung across each other's shoulders, hands thumping each other's backs in that jubilant way boys have. Like there'd never been a breach between them.

Hermione walks a few paces behind them, Ginny catching her eye as they pass. Hermione rolls her eyes in exasperation at Harry and Ron, the censure softened by the brilliant smile on her lips. _Boys_, she seems to say.

Ginny shrugs her shoulders in commiseration and turns back to Tobias and Smita, who are still madly debating the scores assigned by the judges. (Rather Tobias is madly debating, Smita only occasionally disagreeing.)

Tobias throws his arms up. "No way Potter should have gotten that many points. He used the simplest spell ever!"

"No one else thought of it though, did they," Smita counters. "Besides, you have to admit he flew very well."

Tobias frowns. "Yeah. I suppose so. But I still say Fleur had the best…technique." He gets a stupid grin on his face.

Smita doesn't glare exactly, just gets this look on her face like maybe she wishes Fleur had gotten a bit more singed as well.

Ginny slows her steps and lets them get ahead of her as the crowds stream up towards the castle. Smita has never said anything, but Ginny isn't stupid.

This is how she ends up alone when Draco ambushes her. He shouts a spell she doesn't know, something hitting her in the back like a gong, vibrating unpleasantly through her bones. It doesn't particularly hurt, so she doesn't immediately panic. Not until she tries to turn and face her attackers and realizes she can't.

She's completely immobilized, from toes to throat, her body frozen as if encased in ice.

It's the worst thing she has ever felt.

Draco circles around in front of her, standing much too close. "You think you can pull one over on _me_, Weasley?" he hisses, holding up a badge. In her panic, it takes her eyes a while to adjust to what he's trying to show her.

The badge no longer says 'Harry Potter Stinks.' It's now stuck saying 'Draco Malfoy is an inbred tosser.'

Her eyes widen, not so much at the insult as the livid lines of Draco's face as it occurs to her that she's utterly helpless. She never wanted to feel this again.

_Pathetic_.

"Is there a problem here?" a calm voice asks.

Ginny's tormentors look up to see Professor Snape approaching, and Draco drops his wand. Ginny feels her limbs soften and relax and wants to cry with the relief of it.

"Just practicing for Charms," Draco lies, clearly comfortable in his assumption that their Head of House will choose his side.

Sure enough, Snape gives him an indulgent smile that makes Ginny's teeth ache. _I'm in your house too_, she wants to say.

Snape's eyes flit over her, catch, and then almost linger. "Is there something you wish to add, Miss Weasley?"

Draco gives her a threatening glance from behind Snape's back.

She clenches her jaw, not sure which of them she hates more in that moment. "No, sir."

Snape nods, black eyes glittering. "Then why don't you move along."

Draco and his cronies saunter off, and Ginny watches them go, willing her heartbeat back to a normal rhythm. She's not sure if it's fear or anger that is making her legs shake, but with Snape still there watching her, she forces herself to start walking, legs be damned.

Snape follows a few paces behind her all the way back up to the castle, as if he doesn't even trust her to do that properly.

"Miss Weasley," he says as she splits off in the entryway.

She turns back to look at him, not bothering to hide her blazing anger. "Yes, sir?" she asks, clipping the words short.

He looks taken aback, as if he hadn't expected that sort of a response from her. But then his face clears, settling back into cool, uncaring lines, and she's sure she imagined the glimmer of something almost…sad in his eyes.

His chin lifts. "No loitering in the halls."

It takes her a moment to understand that he's chastising her, when he'd been the one to stop her in the first place. "Yes, sir," she says again, spinning on her heel and disappearing down the steps.

She can feel his eyes on her back as she goes.

"Ginny," Smita says as she enters the common room. "Where did you-?"

But she must look almost as bad as she feels, because Smita stops talking mid-sentence and steers her to their dorm.

Her hands are still shaking.

Ginny spends the next thirty minutes calling Draco and Snape every dirty word she can think of.

"I didn't even do it!" she exclaims, hands slapping down on her quilt. It's the most galling part, not that Draco had done that to her, but that she hadn't been brave enough to think of pulling the prank he'd been getting revenge for in the first place. She _should_ have thought of it.

"It was Tobias," Smita says, eyes wide and horrified.

"What?" Ginny asks.

Smita bites her lip, shooting her an uncertain look. "The badge. I'm sure he never meant for you…"

Ginny shakes her head. Lying down on the bed, she wraps her arms around her pillow. "It doesn't matter."

Smita curls up on the foot of the bed with her, her hand tight and comforting around Ginny's ankle.

Ginny starts awake the next morning with Smita's weight heavy across her legs and a voice ghosting her ears, fading dreams of ink stains and pulling strings and limbs moving without her control.

"Ginny?" Smita asks, blinking sleepily up at her from the foot of the bed.

"Cramp," Ginny lies, pulling her legs up to her chest and rubbing at her calf.

"Sorry," Smita says, sitting up and grimacing as she stretches her back.

The other girls in the room are stirring, and it's time to get dressed and go down for breakfast and go to class. Normal.

Normal.

* * *

><p>In the weeks leading up to the Yule Ball, Ginny is careful never to be caught out alone in the halls. She isn't sure what Smita has told Tobias, but the two of them seem to slip into an unspoken sort of buddy system.<p>

Part of Ginny wants to make a caustic remark that Slytherins aren't supposed to care like that, but it seems stupid and petulant and this is Smita she is talking about. Even Tobias seems sobered by what happened.

_We Slytherin need to stick together, after all._

She feels like there's supposed to be a joke in there somewhere, but she doesn't much feel like laughing.

In potions, she looks up from time to time, almost certain she'll find Snape watching her. He never is. Why would he be?

The night of the Yule Ball, Ginny sits up waiting for the older girls to return, wanting to listen to their stories of dancing and dresses and gossip. Maybe dream a little of a day she will be the one out late.

Only the bustling group of girls returning from the party are not laughing or yawning with weary satisfaction. They sweep into the common room in a frenzy of agitation and high-pitched voices, one of their numbers cocooned in the middle.

"He deserves to die," one girl puts in.

Even from her hiding spot, Ginny can see the angry bruises rising on the skin of the girl standing in the middle, streaks of tears on her face. Torn cloth. It takes her a moment to put it all together, to work out the pronouns against the colors. When she gets it, she feels a prickle of fear work its way down her spine. She remembers not being able to move, being completely under someone else's power.

Ginny can't help but consider how fragile it is be to be a girl sometimes.

"Suffering is so much better," another girl counters, seemingly not so much disturbed by the hypothetical murder as the limited opportunity for punishment.

The other girls chime in, plans swirling around the room. How they can get on the boat, sink it, curse the doors shut for all time, each idea more vicious than the last.

"No," Theodora cuts across, the seventh year's voice silencing all the others. She isn't particularly tall or loud or even beautiful, isn't technically Head Girl, but Ginny has seen the way everyone defers to her. The way she is in charge in all the ways that matter. "It will have to be public. Everyone needs to learn what happens when they try to take from a Slytherin."

One girls casts a charm on everyone's faces. They aren't transformed, just blurred. Try as she might, Ginny's eyes keep sliding away from their faces like a raindrop down a window pane. With the dark hood pulled up over their heads, they look enough like Dementors that Ginny feels a thrill of fear streak down her spine.

Ginny turns to find Smita sitting right next her, face a bit paler than usual, but calm all the same.

"I'm going," Ginny decides, knowing somehow that she needs to see this unfold.

Smita swallows. "Okay."

"You don't have to…," Ginny starts to say.

"If you go, I go," Smita says.

Ginny slips her hand into Smita's, giving it a squeeze.

Hogwarts has taken a lot from her, including Quidditch, but following out after them feels a lot like flying.

By the time they catch up with the older girls, they've spirited Gregor out of the Durmstrang ship. They frogmarch him forward to stand in front of Liza, only recognizable by the torn hem trailing out of her robes.

"Is this him?" one of the girls (Ginny suspects Theodora) asks, her voice harsh and distorted.

"What?" Gregor tries to protest.

One of his keepers whips out her wand, snarling, "_Petrificus totalus_." Gregor's body snaps upright, only his eyes still wildly swiveling.

"Is this the boy?" Theodora repeats.

There's a rustle of cloth that Ginny thinks may be a nod. "It is."

"Did you tell him his attentions were unwanted?"

Liza's hand flinches towards her shoulder. "Yes."

"Did he listen?"

"No."

"Do you swear upon your magical blood that this is true?"

"I do."

"Very well."

The circle of girls closes around Gregor.

Ginny is thirteen when she sees her first Unforgivable Curse up close. She knows she should be horrified, knows the punishment for these terrible crimes is a life in Azkaban, but watching the Durmstrang boy writhe and babble, beg for forgiveness, doesn't seem so much evil as well deserved. What is more unforgivable, a nasty spell or the crime this boy committed?

Right?

_Might is right_, Tom reminds her, voice cruel and cutting_._

Ginny and Smita watch at the girls force Gregor to write out a confession, his hands clumsy under the Imperius Curse. The girls then enlarge and copy and slather the walls with his words. It's only when they bind him, a rope around his neck that Ginny shifts forward, her heart in her throat. Surely they wouldn't-.

Ginny surges forward as they stand him up on balcony above the entrance. Smita grabs her arm, trying to hold her back, but Ginny shakes her off. Gregor goes over the edge with a muffled squeak.

Ginny must have made some noise of protest because they all turn to look at her, faces still warped and twisting, a ghostly layer hanging over their features like mist. For the tiniest moment, Ginny thinks, _This is it. I'm next._

But the one Ginny suspects is Theodora raises her hand, the group of girls parting as if inviting Ginny to inspect their handiwork.

She isn't sure how she gets her feet moving, just swallows hard against the tightness in her throat and steps quietly through the ranks.

There's a whisper as she passes, a cool breeze fluttering across her face. It takes her a moment to register that someone has disguised her. To protect her or themselves, she doesn't know. She leans over the ledge, her fingers pressing hard against the cold stone.

Gregor stares up at her with wide eyes, swaying side to side from a harness tied around his waist. Terrified, but very much alive.

She thinks maybe she should be horrified, that she should disapprove of this form of Slytherin cruelty. But all she feels is a grim beat of satisfaction, the corner of her mouth lifting.

When she turns back around, all of the girls have disappeared. Only Smita stands in the hall, hands pressed to her mouth.

Ginny scrambles over to her, grabbing her arm. "Come on. Let's get out of here." It wouldn't do to be caught so close to the scene of the crime.

Smita doesn't argue, letting Ginny drag her away.

* * *

><p>Gregor's body is found swinging over the entrance of the Great Hall the next morning, his eyes wide as he screams soundlessly against his gag. And above him, written in his own hand, is his confession.<p>

_I am a pervert and a thief. I took from a Slytherin what she was not willing to give. For this I deserve to die._

They'd made him believe it, too, right up until the moment the rope around his middle stopped his fall—safe, but shaken. If there needed to be any more evidence of his fear, all one had to do was look at the suspicious puddle collected right underneath him.

It takes the professors almost an hour to figure out how to get Gregor down. It's another two weeks before the signs fade. Long enough for every student at the school to have witnessed the spectacle first hand.

As the days pass, the girls watch Ginny, eyes following her, and she suspects they are waiting to see if she is going to turn them in, going running to Snape or Dumbledore. They'll have a long time to wait.

She still doesn't understand what happened that night, or how she feels about it, but she's not going to run to a teacher. Not Snape, not McGonagall. She suspects they don't have all the answers the way they want the students to think they do.

In the end, there's no one to punish, not even after Gregor regains the ability to speak. He can only babble about faceless wizards in robes. This is yet another part of what it means to be Slytherin, Ginny learns. Just because they are willing to do the task doesn't mean they are willing to take the fall.

It doesn't keep the boys of Hogwarts and Durmstrang alike from sliding the Slytherin girls wary glances. Ginny feels it as she walks down the hall, the green of her uniform like a brand, a warning.

For weeks, Ginny can't think of that night without a strange swooping sensation unsettling her stomach. She doesn't think it's fear, but something else entirely. Something new and strange and somehow…incredibly right.

She wonders what that says about her.

In her dreams at night, Tom laughs long and hard, victory trilling in the sound.

* * *

><p>The second task isn't quite as exciting as the first, though no less tense. It's just the entire school on the banks of the lake, standing around staring at the surface of the water until one by one the champions resurface, their hostages in tow.<p>

Harry's done well again (despite his best efforts to let his brain be overruled by rash bravery yet again), and as usual Draco seems to take that as a personal insult. But Harry is surrounded by admirers and well-wishers (funny how quickly things can change) and less well-wishing reporters (and how some things don't), and Draco can't touch him. Instead it's time for his second favorite game.

He walks a few paces behind Ginny all the way up to the Castle, muttering insulting things under his breath the whole way. She's tense in her shoulders, but not particularly worried as they are surrounded by other students.

Draco appreciate being ignored, eventually stepping across her, opening his mouth as if to lay into her yet again.

Only nothing comes out. He just sort of croaks, one hand lifting to his throat.

Ginny frowns, wondering what the hell is going on. Before she can think better of it, she half-reaches for him to see if he's okay.

He jerks back away from her, glancing down at her wand hand, still hanging empty and useless down by her side.

Ginny spreads her hands wide. Whatever this is, she hasn't done it. He may try to blame it on her, but there are more than twenty witnesses to the fact that Ginny never even pulled her wand.

He starts panicking in earnest then, Goyle clawing at Malfoy's throat as if to free him from something.

Just when she's beginning to worry he's going to suffocate, whatever has a hold of him seems to let go, Draco gulping in giant lungfuls of air as he hangs between Crabbe and Goyle.

Above the crowd, Ginny notices one of the Slytherin girls from the night of Yule Ball walking away, her long black ponytail jaunting behind her as she goes. Antonia, Ginny remembers. A fifth year. Not sparing a glance for the still gasping Draco, Ginny follows after her.

She catches up just as Antonia reaches the common room. "Did you…did you do that?"

Antonia's eyes widen with fake innocence. "Do what?" Continuing ahead, she glides down the steps. Ginny wonders if she does anything less than elegantly, like her entire life is choreographed.

Ginny isn't going to be put off that easily though, elegant exit or not. She's convinced now that Antonia _had_ been behind whatever happened to Draco. The why of it is much more confusing, but she can't quite imagine asking Antonia why she'd bothered to help her, so instead she asks, "How did you do that?"

Antonia turns to Ginny like a conspirator, like she'd just been waiting for the question. "You know the best part of that little spell? It's utterly untraceable. Even if someone were to inspect your wand, check prior spells, it only shows up as Accio." She laughs, flourishing her wand. "It's brilliant."

"Is that…legal?" Ginny asks.

Antonia's eyebrow lifts like this is the most ridiculous question Ginny could have ever asked.

Someone else decides to answer the question. "I don't think that's what you're really trying to ask."

Ginny turns to see Theodora reading near the fire, her blond hair pulled back in a glossy, tight ponytail. Ginny glances at Antonia to gauge her reaction to this uncharacteristic interjection by the seventh year. She rarely lowers herself to the conversations of others.

Antonia just smirks at Ginny, a bit like _oh now you're in for it_.

"What…" Ginny's voice falters and she clears her throat. "What am I trying to ask?"

Theodora presses a finger to a line in her book to keep her place. "You didn't seem to have an issue with legality the night of the Yule Ball."

Ginny feels her stomach lurch. No. She really hadn't. She'd had her chance to turn them in, to raise the alarm, to do anything other than simply watch and stay silent. But it's still not the same as participating.

Isn't it?

"You don't really want to know if it's legal or not," Theodora says, eyes lifting to Ginny's face as if asking a question.

Ginny gnaws on the inside of her lip. "I want to know if it's right," she says.

"They aren't always the same," Theodora says, something just slyly superior enough in her tone to put Ginny's teeth on edge.

Ginny frowns. "And who decides that? You?"

Ginny hears Antonia suck in a surprised breath behind her, but doesn't dare look back. It's very possible she's pushed too far, miscalculated, but she's not going to turn tail and run, even if she should. Her back straightens, chin lifting.

Theodora surprises them both by smiling, something broad and faintly patronizing, but amused all the same. "That's the interesting part," she says, snapping her book shut and pushing to her feet. She steps closer to Ginny, towering over her by a good five inches. She's only four years Ginny's senior, but at this moment feels as if it might as well be five hundred.

Theodora reaches out towards Ginny's face, and despite herself, Ginny flinches, not sure what to expect. Theodora's smile broadens, her fingers pausing before sliding down a strand of Ginny's hair.

Leaning into Ginny, Theodora says, "You're stuck deciding that for yourself."

Ginny frowns, wanting to ask more questions, but Theodora is clearly finished with the conversation. With a brief nod to Antonia, Theodora sweeps from the room, moving past a wide-eyed Smita standing in doorway.

Antonia recovers, laughing as she pats Ginny on the shoulder. "Bloody hell," she swears under her breath, amusement tingeing the words.

"What was that?" Smita asks, watching Antionia leave.

Ginny shakes her head, feeling her knees still trembling. She has no idea.

* * *

><p>Charms is one of Ginny's favorite subjects. It's a little chaotic but productive and almost every class is spent with wands in hand actually <em>doing<em> something, not discussing theory for hours as in Transformation, or worse, the endless drone of things that happened long ago in History of Magic. Smita prefers numbers and theory, but that's just her nature. Ginny has always preferred the doing.

This year they've settled into sitting with a girl called Luna Lovegood. She's a blond, willowy, dreamy Ravenclaw who is somehow incredibly likable in her own bizarre way. Smita doesn't seem to mind Luna, despite the things she says sometimes. Luna may be weird, but she's clever and takes the work seriously unlike some of their other classmates. That's more than enough for Smita.

Ginny likes Luna for the simple fact that she may be odd, but she's _honest_. Ginny likes talking with someone and knowing with absolute certainty that they mean everything coming out of their mouth, even if it is about Crumple-Horned Snorkacks or something equally crazy. It's soothing.

For all they like Luna though, she's still just a passing acquaintance. They don't talk or hang out or meet to study. So when Ginny and Smita are stuck cleaning up a catastrophic cascade of ink splattered all over the walls by a rogue spell, Luna leaves with everyone else.

Ginny shows Smita a useful siphoning charm she picked up from her mum, so they're able to make pretty quick work of it. By the time it's all done, the last stragglers of their class are still lingering outside.

Ginny steps out into the hall just in time to hear a voice drawl, "Loony, loony Lovegood," in a singsong voice, laughter echoing behind the taunt.

Two boys are standing in Luna's path, blocking her way as they tease her. Ginny recognizes the blue and silver of their uniforms, identifying them as Ravenclaws. She wonders if being in the same house as Luna makes them feel like they have the right to ridicule her.

It's time to walk away, to leave Luna to her own. Smita has already turned, a few steps down the hall to where Tobias is waiting. Ginny's about to follow, only then one of the boy's wands lifts, twitching as if to deliver a hex to go with the stinging words. Ginny remembers with shuddering clarity the feel of her body totally immobilized.

Her feet move her forward without any conscious thought.

"Oy," Ginny snaps, stepping up behind the two boys.

"What?" they say.

The first boy blanches when he realizes who he is talking to. Not Ginny Weasley, but a Slytherin. For the first time that terrified look doesn't make Ginny feel like a monster.

"Leave her alone," Ginny says.

The second boy looks a little steadier, crossing his arms over his chest. "Or what?"

There was a time she wouldn't have had the guts to stand under that challenge, would have preferred to walk away. _Don't draw attention to yourself_. But, dammit, she _likes_ Luna. And this isn't right.

Ginny takes a small step forward, lifting one eyebrow the way she's seen Theodora do. "Do you really want to find out?" she asks, fingers toying with her wand.

It starts off as nothing but bluster, a moment of make-believe, but she realizes in that moment that she _will_ hex him if she has to, that she has that in her. She's had years of practicing on her brothers after all, been standing up for herself her entire life. (And why, oh _why_ had she forgotten that? Why had she tried to be something different?)

She can do this.

But Antonia's voice is in her head, cautioning Ginny that it would be better not to hex the stupid gits out here in the hall in front of so many witnesses. Ginny smiles grimly at the properly Slytherin reasoning.

Her smile seems to make the bolder boy falter, just for a moment. He's not a Gryffindor, after all, not one to be fueled to stupidity by bravery. So when Smita steps up next to Ginny, Tobias by her side, the Ravenclaw boy backs away, clearly having done the maths. He scowls at her, but turns away.

Smart, those Ravenclaws.

The remaining students who have loitered long enough to see the outcome all turn to each other in a rush, whispers and shouts echoing against the stones as they rehash what just happened.

Ginny stows her wand and turns to Luna, who has been watching the proceedings with wide-eyed placidity, as if she's wondering just what all the fuss is about.

"Would you like to go down by the lake and work on our Charms homework?" Ginny asks.

It hurts a little bit, the way Luna beams as if she's been given the keys to some hidden paradise. "Oh, yes. That would be lovely. I've been meaning to collect more wemba wipplies."

Ginny has no idea what a wemba wipply is, just knows that no one will dare say a thing to Luna when she's around.

Not any more.

It's _right_.

* * *

><p>Ginny grips her wand tighter and takes a cautious step closer to the object in front of her.<p>

It's a mirror, one of those tall, fancy oval ones Auntie Muriel is partial to. Only the glass on this one is scratched and foggy, and almost seems to creak, as if tiny faults were opening in the surface. More than anything, Ginny wants to turn away, to get as far from the sinister object as she can.

Steeling her spine, she forces herself to step closer, centering herself on the mirror. Her reflection slides into view. Only it isn't her reflection looking back at her. Cool, angular features stare out at her from under a mop of dark hair, his deep green robes reflecting her own.

"Changeling," he accuses, voice like a snake.

Instinctually, Ginny lifts her hand, trying to block the image, hide it from view. His hand breaches the mirror surface, grabbing her wrist. She struggles, pulling back, but he only smiles, almost as if a proud brother. "Strange likeness," he says, fingers digging into the green ink burned into her skin.

Behind her, Mad-Eye says something in the distance, encouragement maybe, but more likely harsh instruction. Vigilance!

Ginny shakes her head hard as if to dislodge the buzzing in her ears.

_I'm not like you, Tom_, she wants to say.

Tom smiles as if he can hear her. _I made you._

"No."

"Weasley," Moody growls, growing impatient. Peripherally, a whispered hum gets louder, the other students shifting around and growing curious.

Looking Tom straight in the eye, Ginny grips her wand and says, "Riddikulus." She gives him a shock of red hair and a pair of round, black spectacles held together with white tape. He stumbles back in fury, knees caught up in the plaid skirt twining around his legs, and a laugh works its way free from Ginny's throat, the glass shattering.

Strange likeness, indeed.

The Boggart dances back away from her, searching out a new victim to terrorize. It turns into a shark, fluid body slicing through the air like water, and Ginny steps back into the crowd of students to watch. To hide, maybe, Tom's voice still buzzing in her ears.

Only not, because Tom is gone. She knows this. She's always known this, despite her clinging doubts. She is the only one here any more, the one left wondering…wondering if he made her something she never wanted to be.

She glances at the Boggart, now a miniature shark doing laps in a goldfish bowl.

No.

Tom changed her, this she can't deny. He opened her eyes to things she would not have seen otherwise. He hardened her, made her more powerful, but no longer has the ability to manipulate her. Her actions and reasons are all her own.

Her _own_.

"Who was that?" some of the girls want to know after Moody has wrestled the Boggart back into its wardrobe. "An ex-boyfriend?" they tease.

Ginny laughs, the wardrobe shuddering. "Something like that," she says, feeling her cheeks flush.

She walks out of the room, leaving Tom locked in the stones where he belongs.

Finally put in the past.

* * *

><p>Harry Potter comes out of the final Triwizard challenge with a dead body clutched in his arms, and just like that, everything changes.<p>

The grounds are in utter chaos, people shoving in panic. Ginny has long since lost hold of Smita's hand, but knows Tobias was with her. She tries to push forward to where she last caught a glimpse of Harry, searches for the gleam of familiar red hair, the comforting profile of her mother's face.

Instead she finds herself shunted back towards the stands, forced to step into the shadow under the seats to avoid being trampled.

There's a break in the crowd, and she sees Draco standing across the aisle.

For a moment, he looks a little lost, disconcerted among the crying, screaming crowds, the echo of _Cedric_ and _Potter_ and the _Dark Lord_ gaining in intensity. Then he turns to find her watching him, his lips twisting into self-satisfaction, as if he has somehow been responsible for all of this.

She remembers the tick of fear that was there first though. Memorizes it.

Draco nudges the ever present Crabbe and Goyle, gesturing towards Ginny. It's blatant intimidation. She pretends for a moment she's on her broom and this is nothing more than a Quidditch match. Even with the chaos around them, he wouldn't dare try anything on her.

Would he?

A hand closes on her shoulder, and she nearly jumps out of her skin.

"Ginny," George says, reeling her in. Fred is next to him, wand pulled and eyes on the crowd as if not sure what to expect any more.

Ginny steals a moment to glance back across the aisle, but Malfoy is gone.

"Come on, Gin," Fred says, pressing close to her other side. "Mum wants us to wait inside."

They walk her back up to the Castle, veering off for the Great Hall while everyone else is still milling around outside. She can just make out the echoes of hysterical voices rising up the hill, bouncing off the stones.

Inside, they settle in the neutral middle ground, taking seats at the Hufflepuff table.

A whole year of school and somehow Ginny's right back where everything started. Scared witless, feeling so damn small, but with her brothers pressed in on either side like a set of bookends.

Over the next hours, they watch people stream by in the entrance, students to their common rooms, ministry workers and professors, and even once when the hour is very very late, a Dementor.

Ginny draws back against George, feeling the frost ghost her skin, but for once, her ears remain clear. Quiet.

It's maybe another twenty minutes before Mum appears in the hall with Ron.

"Is it true?" Fred asks, jumping to his feet like a spring, all those hours of sitting still snapping in a moment.

Mum gives him a stern look. "Come along," she says, taking Ginny's hand.

But the twins aren't to be shaken off, not tonight. "Is You Know Who really back?" George demands.

Mum blusters and doesn't want to burden them, but if You Know Who could find his way to Harry, he can find his way to anyone.

Ron is the one to stop, to turn back and look at them, his face pale and uncharacteristically serious. "It's true. Harry saw him."

Mum spins to glare at him. "Ronald!"

For once, he doesn't look contrite, looking straight back at her like even he's beginning to grow up a little in the face of what's coming. "They deserve to know," he says.

Mum shakes her head, bustling them all out into the entranceway. "Off to bed with all of you."

As a unit they all turn toward the stairs. Ginny comes to a stop in the middle of the foyer. "Uh, Mum. My room is that way," she says, pointing in the opposite direction.

Mum stops, one foot almost comically lifted over the bottom stair. "Right," she says, looking flustered. Torn. She turns back towards Ginny. "Of course."

Fred drops an arm over Ron's shoulders and grins in a way that doesn't even begin to travel anywhere near his eyes. "Don't worry, Mum. We'll see little Ronnikins back to his bed."

"Tuck him in real nice," George agrees, patting Ron on the head.

Ron takes an indignant swipe at George, and Ginny wants to follow them with more sharpness than she's felt since her first day at Hogwarts.

Mum takes the time to kiss and hug each of them before letting them go up, and Ginny knows things have to be bad when they all let her with minimum fuss. Even Ron.

"Night, Gin," Ron says. She watches him walk away with one hand shoved hard in his pocket, no doubt tight around his wand, like he's waiting for something to jump out at him any moment.

Mum takes her hand, clearing her throat. She looks around. "I don't actually know where-."

Ginny nods. "This way."

She leads her down the stairs and under the grounds towards the lake, the air becoming cooler and humid in a way that has become familiar to Ginny. Mum is quiet, and Ginny tries not to let that put her even more on edge.

More than anything she wants to hear her Mum say everything's going to be okay, that You Know Who being out there isn't the end of everything, but Mum looks so pale and worried that Ginny doesn't dare ask.

"Is Harry all right?" Ginny asks instead as they stop in front of the entrance to her Common Room.

Mum's eyes are worried when she turns away from an intent inspection of the blank stone wall hiding the entrance to the Slytherin dorms. The smile she summons doesn't quite hide it. "Of course, dear. He's fine. They're only keeping him overnight in the infirmary to be certain."

Ginny gnaws on the inside of her cheek. "Will you go back and stay with him?"

Mum gives her an assessing look, like that one she uses sometimes to gauge if it's time to buy another pair of robes for her constantly growing sons. "Do you think I should?"

Ginny nods. She doesn't like the idea of Harry all alone in the infirmary, especially after what's happened. She knows if it was one of them, Mum couldn't have been forced to leave, by Dumbledore or anyone. "I think he'd like that."

Mum gives Ginny another smile, only this one is bright with something that makes Ginny's chest tight. She brushes her hair back from her face the way she used to when she was still a baby, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. "You're a good girl, Ginny," she says, fierce pride in her voice.

Ginny gives her a hug, lingering a second longer to breathe her in. "Good night, Mum."

She whispers the password into the wall and disappears inside. In the common room, not too many students are still up.

She's just turned into the hall leading to her room when she hears Draco's voice in the distance behind her.

"Too bad it wasn't Potter instead. Suppose it would have been too much to ask for both of them to snuff it."

Ginny freezes as their laughter jangles discordantly in her ears.

She's heard her brothers speak of 'seeing red', of reaching the end of their tether and losing it completely, but for her it's not really like that. Nothing snaps. Her vision doesn't change. It's more like a giant calm welling up in her, a sense of knowing, for once, exactly what she has to do.

_You're a good girl, Ginny._

This is easy, this is concrete. Something she can fight, unlike the things that are unfolding outside, already pulling her family apart.

She turns on her heel and marches straight for Draco.

Draco pops up to his feet in surprise when he notices her—her furious pace—his companions much slower on the uptake. She doesn't stop striding towards him until she is right up in his face, pushing him hard in the middle of the chest. He falls back down to the couch with an exclamation of protest, his goons jumping to their feet on either side.

Ginny pulls her wand, hitting Goyle straight on with a bat-bogey hex and stepping back out of Crabbe's reach as he lunges for her. Just another Quidditch match, she tells herself. Another quick curse and she has Crabbe's arms bound, leaving Draco sitting wide-eyed on the couch by himself. (All that misery-fed studying paying off, and, _oh_, does life work in mysterious ways sometimes.)

She steps closer to Draco until she's standing over him and says what she should have the first time he laid a hand on her. "I'm not afraid of you, Malfoy. So if you want a fight, I'm more than happy to give you one."

She can tell he didn't expect her to fight back, to go on the offensive.

He's stuck now though, being called out. There aren't many people here to witness it, just a few Slytherin with no interest in spectacles or Triwizard Tournaments. (They have no idea still, no idea what has happened outside these walls, how everything has changed.) They watch on with various levels of indifference as if merely curious to see how this turns out rather than caring at all who wins. It gives Ginny the strange sensation that she's safe in here, safe in the knowledge that her housemates aren't blindly bound by rules.

It's the very last thing she ever thought to feel here.

Time stretches long, and Draco still hasn't reached for his wand, too frightened to act without his brutish friends. He seems to realize it too.

"You'll regret this, Weasley," Draco drawls, voice dripping with menace.

"No," she says, wand twisting in her fingers. "I don't think I will."

_You're stronger than you know, Ginny._

It's the only thing Tom was ever right about.

She's no longer an easy target, and they both know it.

He proves her right when she turns her back on him—a risk, but a necessary one—and he does nothing other than sit and watch her walk away.

She passes by Theodora on her way out. Her eyes are glued to her book as if nothing untoward has happened, but Ginny thinks there is the slightest smirk playing at her lips as she reads.

_You're left deciding that for yourself._

Not if You Know Who has anything to say about it.

Ginny feels her own grim smile slip.

She turns down the hall and heads for her room.

* * *

><p>A week later they all go home, whispers and rumors and lies twining and building like a gossamer web.<p>

Slytherin's brightest son has been reborn.

Ginny waits along with everyone else to see what that will mean.


	4. Year Four

_**Fourth Year**_

Percy doesn't slam the door as he leaves, probably only because it would be too undignified. The Burrow still manages to ring with his departure, the nasty things he said lingering in the air.

_Dumbledore. Harry. Liars. Fools. _

He'd taken all his things with him. All evidence of his existence gone, leaving his room empty like a giant ripped out hole.

Down in the kitchen, Mum is quietly weeping, Dad's voice low and hollow as he tries to console her. Tries to pretend his middle son hadn't just called him a disgrace and a failure.

_You're picking the wrong side._

Fred and George, eavesdropping from the stairwell, turn to each other with matching rage.

"Slimy, overly ambitious little prick."

George's scowl is feral. "Sorting hat must've had an off day, day it put that twat into Gryffindor."

Fred huffs in agreement. "Better off in Slytherin."

One flight above them, Ginny silently shifts up off the steps and disappears into her room.

* * *

><p>Strange owls arrive at the Burrow at all hours that summer. The only thing more plentiful are the visits of various wizards at weird hours, some Ginny recognizes, some she's never seen before. The children are told to stick close to the house, and not even Fred and George have the heart to argue with Mum over it.<p>

They never speak of Percy.

They don't speak about a lot of things actually.

Ginny reads the papers, pulls them out of the bin when no one is looking, but they seem normal enough to her. Forecasts and politics and coupons. She lets herself wonder for a moment if Percy had been right. Because if terrible things are happening, evil wizards reborn, wouldn't that be in the papers?

Only then she'll catch sight of her father's exhaustion, the way Mum's eyes never stray far from her clock, and remembers Ron's face the night of the final Triwizard challenge.

_It's true. Harry saw him. _

Ginny doesn't doubt it, not really. It's just that she always thought that if the most evil wizard of all time came back to life, there'd be big fights and stirring speeches, good lining up against evil. This seems too…quiet.

Hermione shows up on their doorstep less than two weeks into break. If Ginny really needed more proof that things aren't right, now she has it.

"I just couldn't sit there and pretend nothing had happened," Hermione says, lifting a stack of clothes out of her trunk.

"What did you tell your parents?" Ginny wants to know, thinking of Mr. Granger's pleasant face and honest discomfort with a life he will never fully understand. Never fully be a part of.

_There's going to be a war._

Hermione glances at the newspapers spread across Ginny's bed. "Not the truth."

Of course not.

* * *

><p>Hermione's only been at the Burrow a week when Mum and Dad give them the news over supper.<p>

"We're leaving the Burrow," Dad says.

Mum's hand is in his, creating a united front. "It isn't safe here any longer."

This is inconceivable, the idea that the Burrow could be anything other than the safest place in the world. But there are wizards appearing in the fire in the middle of the night, special charms around the perimeter of their property that her parents probably thought they wouldn't notice.

"Where are we going?" Ron asks, sharing one of his unsubtle looks with Hermione.

"To stay at the home of one of the members of the Order," Dad says. "Dumbledore has arranged it."

"Whose house?" Fred asks, picking up on Dad's deliberate vagueness.

Mum and Dad share a glance. "Sirius Black."

Ginny feels her stomach drop, remembering his face screaming out at them from posters.

"Sirius Black?" Fred echoes. "The Sirius Black who tried to kill Harry last year?"

"Year before that," George corrects. "Last year it was Mad-Eye."

Fred considers that. "_Fake_ Mad-Eye."

"Right. I can never keep track, who's trying to kill Harry at any given time."

Fred nods. "Quite the thing apparently. Like a sport club."

"Wonder if they have blazers?"

Dad clears his throat. "Boys," he says. If you give Fred and George any steam at all, they can go on forever.

"I don't understand," Ginny says, something she's wanted to admit all summer long.

Mum reaches over and pats Ginny's hand as if to comfort her, like a young child in danger of being hysterically confused by the adult things around her. "It's a long story, but Sirius Black is on our side. He's part of the Order."

Ginny glances at Hermione and Ron, noticing that neither of them look remotely surprised. "Since when?" she asks, her voice rising in pitch.

Dad meets her eyes steadily. "He always has been. It was all a misunderstanding."

A misunderstanding? Murdering all those Muggles and breaking out of Azkaban and trying to kill Harry and her brother too by accident? Ginny isn't sure who, but she's convinced someone here is cracked. Maybe it's her.

"We'll explain more later," Dad says, pushing up from the table and officially ending the conversation. "For now we need you all to pack and be ready to leave for London in the morning."

Fred and George look delighted. "Spend the rest of the summer at a deranged mass-murderer's house in the city? Wicked."

"Lee is going to be so jealous."

It's only later that they realize just how protected the location is, that not only are they not allowed to tell anyone about it, but that they _couldn't_ even if they wanted to. Secret-keepers and powerful spells, and Ginny is still looking for a war that doesn't seem to be coming.

She doesn't understand. Not why they are moving, what these meetings of strange wizards are about, _why_ Percy left.

And still they don't talk about it.

* * *

><p>It's hard to imagine a place more different from the Burrow than Grimmauld Place. Here everything is grand and opulent, a sort of elegance gone to seed like an abandoned formal garden. While the Burrow is made of hearth stone and scarred wood and sturdy tweed, patched and repaired and lovingly kept, the Black mansion is a gossamer web of marbles and velvets and fabrics Ginny can't name, each worn thin and clogged with dust. She begins to forget what color feels like after a few days, surrounded as she is by moaning silences and stifling shadows.<p>

It's a place of secrets, Grimmauld Place, feels built on those shuddering foundations. Ginny supposes it's only right that it should serve as the Order's headquarters. Order of the Phoenix, they call themselves, and she wonders at the symbolism there, what they are rising from, wonders what Smita might say of it, these people apparently driven here by lies and truths they won't speak of.

She tries asking sometimes, asking why the papers are calling Harry a liar and Dumbledore a fool. Mum just sends her on her way, Ron and Hermione sharing dark looks behind her back.

"Nothing for you to worry about, dear," Mum says, over and over like she's trying hard to believe it.

Ginny writes long letters to Smita. Some complaining about her parents and the house and the doxy bite on her finger that just won't heal. Some about phoenixes and meetings and Fred and George whispering in the halls. Once, she writes nearly 30 inches about an imaginary summer spent at the Burrow running drills in the paddock and swimming in the river and a tiny room with a view over trees and _space_.

She wonders when the lies became more believable than the truths.

She even tries to write Percy a letter once, but doesn't get any farther than, _You prat…_, thinking of the way he made Mum cry.

She sends Smita the letter built on make-believe and burns the rest one by one in the hearth fire with Kreacher's beady eyes drilling in her back.

She gradually gets used to seeing Sirius Black in the halls and not have her heart beat out of her chest in fear. He's just as worn and furious and full of fractured energy as he seemed in his pictures back when he was trying to kill Harry. (Only not, she's been told, but not much else.) She isn't sure what it means that it's when Sirius smiles that she feels a true ripple of unease.

There are other wizards around too. Worn Professor Lupin and twitchy Mad-Eye (the _real_ one). And even some young ones, like Tonks. She's one of the only people who can get anyone to laugh any more. The others just walk past like Ginny isn't even there.

The first time Ginny realizes Professor Snape is in the Order as well, she comes across him in the hallway. He's standing with Sirius, the two of them sniping at each other like schoolboys who never quite grew up.

Sirius is clearly on edge, like he's one more word away from losing his temper completely. It's Snape who is all cool surfaces that remind Ginny uncomfortably of Smita if not for the cutting edge to his clipped words. She wonders what it would take for Smita to ever be that vicious.

She steps into the hall with heavy, trudging steps, breaking the two men apart. Sirius glances at her and with one last scowl at Snape, disappears further back into the building, leaving her alone with Snape.

"Professor," Ginny says politely because for all she has learned to resent Snape, he's her head of house, her teacher.

"Miss Weasley," he says, head inclining the perfect amount like he's practiced it.

She nods in response, and idly wonders what the Malfoys would think if they knew he was here.

"Did you say something?" Snape asks, eyebrow lifting.

There's a slight buzz in her ear, but she brushes it off with a firm shake of her head. "No, sir."

She slides past him, taking the stairs two at a time, and bumps right into Ron and Hermione on the next landing.

She can't quite look either of them in the eye.

* * *

><p>Dumbledore himself shows up one afternoon, setting both Ron and Hermione down for a serious talk about what they can and can't put in their letters to Harry.<p>

Ginny doesn't consider it eavesdropping, not really. She's just field-testing Fred and George's latest invention: extendable ears. It has nothing to do with getting answers to things people refuse to explain.

Even so, the conversation doesn't make anything any clearer, the three of them seeming to speak in some code she isn't initiated in.

Dumbledore comes out first, so suddenly and quietly that Ginny is still practically standing against the door. She tugs the extendable ear, the flesh colored string disappearing up into her sleeve. She considers trying to scramble away, but has learned well enough what looks guilty and what can be played through. Besides, Dumbledore is a busy, somewhat mental wizard. He may not even notice her.

"Miss Weasley," Dumbledore says, his eyes unerringly finding her in the dim hallway as if he knew she were there all along.

So much for that theory.

"Headmaster," Ginny says with a nod of her head she hopes looks innocent and respectful.

He doesn't seem particularly interested in scolding her, so she expects him to move on, to walk past her like all the other Order members do, but he surprises her by lingering. "How have you found your holiday thus far, Miss Weasley?"

It's a polite inquiry, and she knows she's supposed to say something like, "Fine, sir," or "Pleasantly free of homework, sir," but all she can think of are secret meetings, closed doors, and furious whispers. The way people here have conversations that seem to be about anything other than the actual words said.

So instead, Ginny frowns and says, "Confusing."

Both of Dumbledore's eyebrows lift, eyes sparkling behind his glasses as if this were the most brilliant thing to say and not something stupid and childish.

He nods, leaning slightly towards her like a conspirator. "I am pleased to know I am in such good company."

Ginny stares back at him, not sure if she should find the idea of someone like Dumbledore confused comforting or simply terrifying.

"Perhaps the rest of the season shall be more elucidating," he says, smiling and taking his leave of her.

Ginny feels a shiver travel down her spine. Somehow that that possibility seems as unsettling as confusion.

* * *

><p>Harry arrives three weeks into their stay. In many ways it's like a storm long on the horizon finally breaking, his anger snapping through the gloom as his voice shakes the walls of Grimmauld Place. She envies him his temper tantrum, just the littlest bit. He rages and slams and demands the very answers she's wanted all along.<p>

She thinks she may finally get some of them too, as they all sit in the kitchen and listen to Sirius explain why everyone thinks Harry is a liar. She watches Harry's expressive face harden to stone and remembers what it feels like to have the entire world spin against you.

Mum sends her away though, when Sirius finally starts talking about the Order and their secrets. Sends her to bed like a little girl. She doesn't go with any sort of grace, dragging her feet, silently raging.

She doesn't know whether to be insulted or satisfied that Mum takes the precaution of locking her in her room. She clearly knows about the eavesdropping. She at least has the presence of mind not to say, 'This is for your own good.'

Ginny sits in her room and fantasizes about grabbing a broom and slipping out the window and never bothering to come back.

Too bad fantasies never amount to anything.

"Tell me," Ginny says into the dark later that night, knowing Hermione isn't really sleeping.

There is a pause. "Tell you what?"

Ginny rolls over to look at her. "All of it."

She pretends not to see the uncertainty flicker across Hermione's face, the moment of doubt. Doesn't let herself analyze if that is concern for her tender age (as if), or if this is something else entirely. Like maybe distrust.

"Please," Ginny says, hating herself for the pleading in her voice.

Hermione starts to whisper.

* * *

><p>Harry quickly settles in with the rest of them, alternating between fruitlessly trying to spy on the Order and even more fruitlessly trying to avoid having to clean. With all the bedrooms done, they've moved on to a strange collection of seemingly purposeless rooms. Ginny supposes the rich need to invent something to do with all the extra space.<p>

It's only an hour or so after lunch when Mum gets pulled away to speak with someone in the Order. She hasn't been gone for all of a minute when Fred and George disapparate back to their rooms with a pop, leaving Ginny, Ron, Hermione, and Harry to clean the dingy solarium on their own.

"Wankers," Ron mutters.

Ginny grunts in agreement, thinking she's really going to like being seventeen and able to use magic whenever she pleases.

Ron rather carelessly flips up the cover on a rickety roll top desk.

Hermione smacks his arm. "Careful! We have no idea what might be in there!"

"Yeah," Ron says dismissively, picking up an old-fashioned fountain pen. "Real evil, these manky old things."

The pen explodes in Ron's face.

Ron howls in complaint, glumpy ink streaming out of his eye. Ginny and Harry rush to their feet, but Hermione is already there, pressing a handkerchief to Ron's face even as she scolds him. Ginny's torn between laughing and being concerned, rather unsuccessfully hiding a snort in her sleeve when it's clear Ron isn't in imminent danger of anything other than looking ridiculous.

"We should take him downstairs," Hermione says, heaving Ron to his feet and pulling him towards the door.

Harry glances back at Ginny uncertainly. "I'll stay," he says, probably deciding that leaving Ginny alone with a room full of things with the potential to explode in her face is not such a great idea. Still, his tone makes it clear enough that he'd rather not be stuck here with her. Of course, she'd pretty much rather be anywhere else in the world herself right about now, so she supposes she can't really take it personally.

Hermione nods, steering Ron out into the hall, the echo of his moaning trailing after them.

Ginny sits back down, flicking an embroidered cushion towards the bin. "Safety in numbers," she barks, channeling Mad-Eye.

Harry jerks around, looking at her with surprise.

"What?" she asks, shaking a cobweb off her fingers. This place is _disgusting_.

"You sounded just like him."

Ginny shrugs. "You should hear my Madam Pince."

He gives her strange look like maybe he's amused against his will. Ginny rolls her eyes and goes back to cleaning.

They work in silence except for the occasional "Yuck" or sound of something crashing into the dustbin. Kreacher wanders in once just long enough to pin Ginny with beady eyes and mumble something about the youngest blood traitor mongrel.

Ginny stares back at him with her best icy, Theodora-inspired glare.

Once he's gone, Ginny pulls a small dusty chest out of the rotting armoire. It's an ugly little thing, really, the outside rusted and faded and she can't quite even tell if it's wood or metal. It just feels wrong in her hands. As she moves to put it aside, her thumb brushes the front clasp, and the lid springs open without a sound.

Ginny traces the fine scalloped edge with a finger, her eyes drawn to the rich red velvet lining the inside. Blinking slowly, she sits back on her heels, a hum building in her mind. It's beautiful and soft and so _easy_, her body relaxing, limbs feeling boneless.

It's all so _nice_. The space between thoughts growing longer and softer and-.

The lid slams shut, Ginny jerking awake.

Harry is standing over her, his hand on the back of the box. "Ginny?" he asks, peering down at her. "Are you okay?"

She swallows hard against the bitterness at the back of her throat.

"You were just kind of…staring."

She nods. "I think it's cursed," she says, hating the slight wobble in her voice. She lets Harry take it from her, set it aside for someone else to deal with. It occurs to her how stupid it is to be doing this without Fred and George here, seeing as how neither of them can even use their wands.

She wipes her clammy palms on her jeans as if to rid herself of the feel of rusty metal. It's not that the trance was so terrible as much as how _familiar_ it had felt, like a ghost walking on her grave. It's the one thing she hasn't let herself really think about, the fact that Voldemort being alive again means that Tom is alive again too.

Ginny's heart stutters in her chest.

Harry has gone back to work, but keeps sending her concerned looks back over his shoulder. She forces herself to move on to the next shelf, tipping a collection of dusty buttons and thimbles carefully into a bag.

"Looking forward to Quidditch this year?" Harry asks after a while, clearly trying to lighten the mood.

Ginny nods, thankful for the change in topic. "More than you know."

"I suppose we'll both have new captains this year." Oliver Wood and Marcus Flint had graduated at the end of the last year.

Ginny can only pray that Bletchley will get it, because if the badge goes to Draco, she doesn't have a chance in hell of getting on the squad again.

She groans, dropping her face in her hands. Harry may be a shoo-in no matter who is captain of the Gryffindor team, but Ginny knows just how close she'd been not to making it in the first place.

"What?" Harry asks.

She shakes her head. "I haven't been able to run any drills this summer. Trials are going to be a disaster."

"You're the highest scorer on your team," Harry says. "It would be completely mental not to keep you."

Ginny turns, looking at Harry in surprise.

He shrugs. "Wood kept statistics on everyone. Made us all memorize them."

"Of course he did," she says with smirk, remembering all the stories the twins used to tell about the obsessive Gryffindor keeper.

Harry smiles. "Well, you know what Mad-Eye would say."

Ginny thinks she might. "Know your enemy?"

Harry's smile fades, his eyebrows drawing together. "Something like that."

"Ginny?" Mum's voice travels up the stairs.

Ginny's heart lurches. "Oh, no."

"What?" Harry asks, looking around for another malicious item.

Ginny tosses a mysteriously stained tea cloth into the bin. "Mum," Ginny clarifies, glancing at the wardrobe and wondering if it would be big enough to hide in, or if it might just vanish her a convenient distance away. "She's been trying to give me knitting lessons all summer."

"Knitting?" Harry echoes, looking torn between amusement and confusion.

She nods, horror welling in her chest.

Mum appears in the doorway, hands on her hips and disapproval in her eye. "There you are, Ginny. You were supposed to come help me half an hour ago."

Something Ginny had worked hard to conveniently forget yet again. She's not sure she'll be able to get away with this time. Where's an exploding pen when you need one?

"Sorry, Mrs. Weasley," Harry interjects, eyes wide. "It's my fault. I thought it would be safer if none of us cleaned alone." He darts a glance at Ginny. "Safety in numbers, you know."

Mum's expression softens, and it occurs to Ginny that Harry is more than aware of his effect on Mum, and clearly isn't above using it. "Oh! Of course, dear. That is a very wise precaution. Ginny can help me later."

She beams at Ginny then, for her seeming forethought of keeping Harry safe.

All in all, rather brilliantly done.

Still, Harry looks just a little too pleased with himself after Mum leaves, so Ginny can't help it. Pressing one hand to her chest, she says, "My hero," in a breathy voice.

Harry blinks back at her, looking seriously disturbed, until Ginny can't hold it in any more and starts to laugh.

"What's so funny?" Ron demands, reappearing in the doorway with Hermione. He's still got one hand slapped to his eye, the skin around red as if from fresh scrubbing.

"Nothing," Ginny says, dismissing him with a wave.

Ron frowns, sitting down on a moth-eaten chaise. "I really hate this bloody house."

Ginny turns back to the armoire. "Constant vigilance!" she barks.

Behind her, she hears Harry snigger.

* * *

><p>The rest of the summer settles into a mind-numbing sort of regularity as they conquer the house one dusty, dangerous room at a time. Judging from the equally dangerous bangs and smells emanating from the twins' room, their own secret projects are progressing as well.<p>

Soon enough, their letters arrive and it's time to pack for school.

Ginny decides to clean out her trunk properly, something she hasn't really done since the first time she packed for Hogwarts. Cleaning has apparently become second nature after all these weeks. Mum would be so proud. Even if Ginny still hasn't been trapped into a single knitting lesson.

Tonks is helping her, partly to amuse Ginny with her favorite funny faces, but also because she just broke something in the kitchen, and Mum had not so politely asked her to be anywhere that was not near her. It's nice to know Ginny isn't the only one Mum finds to be lacking in domestic usefulness.

Digging into her school trunk is a little like excavating her life at Hogwarts. Clothes, books, potion supplies, quills, and parchment on the top. Midway through, her Quidditch gear. Ginny refolds them carefully and sets them aside with a painful sort of yearning. It's only at the very bottom of her trunk that she finds the Gryffindor scarf Mum had made her first year. Pulling it out, Ginny can see a black ink stain spread across the yellow and burgundy stripes.

Tonks takes the scarf from Ginny, siphoning away the stubborn ink with a few jerky pulls of her wand. She tries to give it back, but Ginny shakes her head.

"Put it with Hermione's things," Ginny says. It's not like she'll ever have a use for it.

Tonks tucks it into Hermione's disturbingly organized trunk without comment.

Ginny watches as Tonks scours out the bottom of the trunk and then starts piling her stuff back in.

"My mother was in Slytherin," Tonks remarks.

Ginny looks for censure, for motive, but Tonks just stares back at her with this fact floating between them like the unmatched pair of socks currently being more tortured than folded under the guidance of Tonks' wand.

"Yeah?" Ginny says, tucking her green scarf and gloves into her cauldron.

"Yeah." Tonks flicks her wrist and the socks zoom into her trunk.

"Was she disappointed?" Ginny asks, tripping over the words in a belated attempt to be delicate.

"That I was sorted into Hufflepuff?" Tonks finishes for her.

Ginny doesn't manage to hide her flinch. "Yeah."

Tonks shakes her head. "Why would she be? It's just a house." Screwing up her eyes in concentration, she makes her hair run long and silver, the sheen of green woven in.

If only it were really that easy.

* * *

><p>At King's Cross, they all pile on to the train together, Mum making a slightly bigger deal of hugging and kissing them all repeatedly. Once on board, the twins take off with Lee immediately, Hermione and Ron splitting off to their special prefect compartment with apologetic glances at Harry.<p>

Harry looks like he's trying to ignore it, but still seems a little lost without the other two. Added to that, other students are openly staring, whispering as they pass, and Ginny hesitates taking off in her own direction. She doesn't know why she bothers, it's not like Harry's going to follow her to the Slytherin section even if she offered.

Harry spots another boy in his year then, looking relieved when he lifts a hand in honest pleasure to see him.

"I'm going to…," Harry says, gesturing down the train.

Ginny smiles. "Of course. I'm off myself," she says, canting her head in the other direction.

"Okay then," he says. "See you around."

Only they both know probably not.

Ginny drags her trunks down past a couple compartments of Ravenclaws, but doesn't see Luna among them, so doesn't pause to say hello. Almost to the front of the train she starts seeing more familiar faces of people in her house, waving every once and a while. She passes Draco's crowd in silence.

She sees Bletchley just long enough to catch sight of a gold captain's badge on his chest and breathes a giant sigh of relief.

Further down, Smita appears out of a compartment. "Ginny."

"Hey," Ginny says, drawing the other girl into a hug. "How are you?"

"I'm fine," she says, pulling back and giving Ginny a speculative look. "Curious, mostly."

"Curious?" Ginny asks, reaching down to lift her trunk up on to a rack.

"Yeah. About whatever it is you really did this summer."

Ginny freezes, almost losing hold on her trunk. Smita steps up next to her and helps her settle it. Ginny had sent the letter full of lies because she couldn't very well have told the truth. If she'd sent nothing, Smita would have worried. It seems she needn't have bothered.

"That obvious, huh?"

"Well," Smita says, lips twitching, and somehow it's like no time has passed since they've seen each other. "You're never that cheerful."

Ginny laughs. "Dead give away."

Smita nods, eyes sparkling with mirth. "Definitely."

The compartment door slides open. "Oi. You birds going to spend the entire trip out here gossiping?"

Ginny turns to see Tobias half hanging out in the hallway. "Why, are you feeling left out? We know how much you love gossip."

He glares at her, and she smiles back as if he hadn't, and that's pretty much a fitting enough welcome after a summer apart.

"We'll be right in," Smita says.

Tobias waggles his eyebrows at her and ducks back inside.

"We can talk about your mystery summer later," Smita says.

Ginny nods, feeling relieved and not knowing why.

Inside the compartment there's a collection of fourth and third year boys in the middle of a rather pitched game of exploding snap. They're swapping more insults than cards, not rowdy like her brothers might be, but methodical and cutting. Ginny thinks the real skill being admired here is who can weave the most subtle insult rather than the turn of a card.

None of them look up from the game, so Ginny doesn't bother saying hello, instead sitting down with Smita near some other girls.

"Hi, Ginny," one of the third year girls says.

Ginny smiles. "Hey, Caroline. Have a nice summer?"

Caroline pulls a face before straightening back up as if automatically expecting a rebuke. "It was fine, I suppose."

The girl sitting next to her touches Caroline's knee as if in comfort.

"Tori got a new instrument this summer though," Caroline says, brightening and turning to her companion.

Astoria (apparently only Caroline can get away with calling her Tori) darts a glance at the boys, but they are still paying the rest of them no attention at all.

Late at night when the Slytherin dorm was quiet, sometimes you could hear the deep vibration of cello coming from somewhere, like the rich tenor of a human voice in the darkness. Ginny's heard rumors about Astoria and her musical talent, even if it is rarely acknowledged outside the safety of the dorms.

"What sort of instrument?" Smita asks, leaning in and lowering her voice.

Astoria pulls open a small case, no larger than a lunch box, letting them look inside. Ginny can just make out the golden glint of a bowed spine, taut strings plunging down into the bottomless space below.

"A harp," she says, eyes sparkling. "My father brought it back to me from the continent."

"Oh?" Smita asks. "Was he traveling?"

Astoria's delicate skin flushes ever so slightly. "On business."

There's just enough of a hesitation for Ginny to know she's lying, but not enough to know why.

Ginny smiles. "I can't wait to hear you play it."

"Oh, no," Astoria says, shaking her head. "I'm still just learning."

They move on to more innocuous topics then, Ginny spinning her own tales of long afternoons spent on a broom in the orchards. Smita lets the lies slide by, Caroline looking on in rapt envy.

Maybe she'll show up at trials his year, but Ginny somehow doubts it. Apparently Caroline's mum doesn't think Quidditch is appropriate for girls. Ginny still remembers Caroline as a first year, eyes wide with wonder as she stared at Ginny, the first girl on the Slytherin team in a decade. It's a sad reminder of just how quickly things can change.

At the other end of the compartment, the boys' card game ends in a shower of sparks, money and goods and insults changing hands.

Tobias drops down between Caroline and Astoria, hooking his arms over their shoulders. "And what are we talking about?" he asks, looking flush with victory.

Astoria turns her cool eyes on Tobias. "New curses we learned over the summer."

Tobias laughs, carefully removing his hand from Astoria's shoulder one finger at a time. "Roger that."

"Stupid berk," Ginny mutters with amusement.

"Now, Ginevra," Tobias says. "Don't be jealous. I'd let you curse me anytime."

The girls all roll their eyes.

And just like that, she's home.

* * *

><p>The Sorting Hat is on a roll this year. Ginny doesn't think she's ever heard it sing a song quite so long before. The first years shift nervously as everyone else's stomachs growl.<p>

"Get on with it," Tobias grumbles.

For her part, Ginny is actually more interested in what the hat is saying than she has been before. (It's possible she still hadn't quite forgiven the hat, as childish as that might be.) Mostly because the hat seems to be wandering into new territory this year.

_Oh, know the perils, read the signs,__  
><em>_the warning history shows,__  
><em>_for our Hogwarts is in danger__  
><em>_from external, deadly foes__And we must unite inside her__  
><em>_or we'll crumble from within__  
><em>_I have told you, I have warned you...__  
><em>_let the Sorting now begin._

Ginny glances around, wondering how the other students will take this rather unexpected warning, but most of them are glassy-eyed by now, or whispering to friends they haven't seen in long months. This warning of dire peril seems to have gone over their heads entirely. She supposes she can't really blame them for that.

Eventually the last student is sorted, and Tobias is rubbing his hands together in anticipation of the feast. He's going to have to wait even longer though, because the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor strong-arms her way up to the podium, an amused Dumbledore looking on.

"Oh, come _on_," Tobias complains.

She's wearing all pink and her voice sounds exactly like someone swathed in pink should sound like, all giggles and squeaks and talking to them like they are toddlers. She blathers on about change and pruning and improving, and after a while Ginny starts looking to Dumbledore for a reaction, but he's as serene as always, bouncing a little on his heels like he might be humming to himself.

Umbridge eventually trails off, pausing expectantly as if for applause. There's a polite smattering from the Hufflepuff table, Tobias starting at the noise as if being woken from a trance.

"What was that?" Smita mutters.

Ginny shakes her head, just as confused as Smita.

The food appears then and they quickly forget the insanity that is Dolores Umbridge.

Happily stuffed and sporting ten new first years, the Slytherin work their way down to the dorms. She passes near Draco and his cronies, just close enough to see them with their heads lowered together and their eyes hostile, occasionally glancing in her direction. Ginny knows Draco's days of openly tormenting her are over, but that doesn't mean she isn't going to have to watch her back.

She glares right back at them and refuses to look nervous. It's all she can do at this point.

As they near the dorms, Ginny feels tension building up in her neck, her steps seeming to drag slower and slower. She braces herself as she steps into the common room.

It looks exactly the same.

"Ginny?" Smita asks, turning back to look at her.

She's not sure what she expected, giant banners and dark marks, secret hand signals and whispered meetings. Really, what could be more ridiculous?

Ginny shakes her head and follows Smita into their room.

* * *

><p>Ginny wakes every morning and checks the board in the common room. There's no announcement for trials the first week. Other than saying 'hi' once when they nearly bumped into each other in the hall, Ginny hasn't spoken to Bletchley. It's making her a little crazy.<p>

She does go down to the pitch every day after classes and run through a series of drills on her broom, trying to blow the dust off of a long year and summer with no Quidditch. She pushes herself until her stomach growls in protest, and slides into the Great Hall just in time not to completely miss dinner.

In the evenings, Ginny tries not to fall asleep from exhaustion and slugs through the piles of homework the professors are gleefully piling on them.

Near the end of the first week, Tobias nudges her in the ribs. "I hear Potter lost it in Umbridge's class."

Ginny squints down at her essay on Switching Spells, not really keen on splitting her attention. "What?"

He nudges her in the ribs again, clearly looking for a riveted audience. "Started shouting about the Dark Lord being back and killing Diggory."

Ginny looks up at Tobias. "Really?"

She remembers the look on Harry's face as Lupin and the others explained why everyone thinks he and Dumbledore are nutters. She isn't really surprised that he'd lost it. She just isn't sure that's the best tactic.

"Mental," Tobias says, shaking his head.

"What did she do?" Smita asks.

Tobias waves his hand dismissively. "Oh, gave him a zillion hours of detention, writing lines, apparently."

They laugh, knowing that can't be fun, but at least it isn't going into the Forbidden Forest or scrubbing toilets.

"But I heard she lost her temper too," Tobias adds, looking thoughtful. "Would have liked to have seen that."

Ginny makes a vague sound of agreement. She has more pressing interests than pink dressed professors and Harry Potter's detentions.

* * *

><p>Finally on Saturday, the announcement goes up on the board. Quidditch trials will be held on Wednesday afternoon.<p>

When the time comes, Ginny lines up with all of the other Quidditch hopefuls, trying to ignore how much taller most of them are. Bletchley gives her a weird look as he walks out onto to pitch, but she doesn't really have any attention left to give it, too focused on the task at hand, on refusing to be intimidated.

Bletchley starts by putting the few people trying for reserve keeper up in front of the rings. "Weasley," he calls out.

"Yes?" she says, stepping forward, trying not to look like he's startled her.

He jerks his head up towards the far rings where the prospective keepers are hovering. "Give 'em each five shots."

She nods, ignoring the grumbling around her, scrambling up onto her broom. Up in the air, everything is easier. She gives each keeper a tentative first shot, just to sweat out their weaknesses, increasing the difficulty with each shot. Few of them stop her second shot, and only one her third. None of them even get a hand on her fourth or fifth.

By the time she's done, there is a trickle of sweat running down her back, and all she wants is more.

Bletchley calls them back down, taking the position in front of the goal himself. He gives each of the prospective chasers five shots, stopping most of them easily. A few times he has to stretch all the way out, barely batting down a shot. One of them was thrown by Warrington, but Ginny's always known he is good, when he actually focuses his mind properly. A few others are a bit of a surprise, and Ginny does her best to keep an eye on them.

When it's time for her turn, Ginny doesn't bother with the tentative shots, varying the angles and approaches and speed with each turn. Bletchley has to be exhausted by now after going through ten series already, which probably explains the two shots she manages to sneak by him.

A few of the other players give her nasty looks, talking behind their hands as they wait for the rest of the trials to finish.

The beaters are a predictable group of brutes of various levels of clumsiness. Disappointingly, she can't see any that have any sense of finesse or cleverness that can be a huge asset at that position. Still, there are a few with promise, even though it is pretty clear that Bletchley is going to go with Crabbe and Goyle. There has to be _some_ benefit to being friends with Draco after all.

Ginny carefully refrains from making any faces when she realizes that there won't even be a trial for the seeker position. Draco and those damn brooms.

Bletchley comes up next to Ginny at the end of the trials. "So what do you think, Six?"

She thinks back to the keepers she'd run drills against. None of them had been that great, few of them even managing to stop one of her shots. Not that it matters as long as they have Bletchley. She shrugs. "Martin and Gilbert could be good in a few years."

Bletchley gives her a look like she's being stupid. "For the other two chasers, nit."

She stares back at him in surprise, but not for long, forcing herself to answer the question despite the part of her running around in her brain jumping up and down in pure excitement. _Other two chasers_.

"Thompson," she says, the decision perfectly clear to her. He's two years older than Ginny and has been on the reserve team for a while. He's not flashy, won't ever play professionally, but he has a steady head on his shoulders and, even more importantly, doesn't seem to resent Ginny the fact that she apparently has Bletchley's ear.

He nods, looking thoughtful. "And Warrington?"

"Yeah."

She's still a little surprised to find that he actually follows her advice when the team roster goes up on the board in the common room. Glancing at the list, she would have hoped for a better seeker and maybe some cleverer beaters, but as it is, the team does have a promising sort of balance.

Maybe this will be their year.

Ginny smiles.

* * *

><p>Everything seems just a little more doable, now that her Quidditch fate is decided. It's been her anchor before, and she's thankful to have that again. If there had been some other reason to cancel Quidditch this year, Ginny might have lost it.<p>

Ginny's on her way out to practice when Hermione waves her down. Her hair is flying about her head, and she's slightly out of breath like she's been running around the castle.

"Hermione?" Ginny asks, surprised by the intent gleam in her eye—the one she usually reserves for trying to talk Ron out of mischief.

"We're going to have a meeting at the Hog's Head next Saturday," she says, voice hushed and eyes darting back and forth.

The Hog's Head? What was this, a dare? "What kind of meeting?"

Hermione's voice lowers even further. "We want to start a defense club."

Ginny's eyebrows shoot up.

"Well," Hermione says waspishly, "we all know Umbridge's class is useless."

"True," Ginny is forced to admit. But she's not sure taking on more work in their free time is really the answer. It's just like Hermione to start an academic club in the face of an incompetent teacher. She must be worried about her OWLs.

Hermione leans in closer to Ginny, expression hardening. "You know why this is important."

Ginny's lips press together, knowing exactly what Hermione is trying to refer to. The only problem is that Ginny isn't sure she _does_ know why this is important. All she knows is what Hermione shared that one night, vague inferences about secret weapons and Order members taking shifts guarding Harry. A Dark Lord supposedly returned from the dead but completely absent.

Things at Hogwarts are ever as they have been and shouldn't that _mean_ something?

"I'll see you then?" Hermione asks, her attention already distracted by trying to unobtrusively wave down a fifth year Hufflepuff girl.

She doesn't linger to hear Ginny's agreement. Ginny watches her go, gnawing on her lip a moment before shaking herself out of it. She doesn't have time to work out Hermione's quirks right now.

There are more important problems afoot, like being late to Quidditch.

* * *

><p>Ginny pretty much ignores Educational Decree number 23 when it appears all over the castle. What does she care about a High Inquisitor?<p>

Maybe if she had paid it a little more attention, she wouldn't have been surprised to see Umbridge sashay into Professor's Burbage's classroom during their Muggle Studies lesson. (Muggle banking systems and making money appear from nothing and disappear from people's pockets. She thought Muggles didn't believe in magic.)

Umbridge arrives late, and that's annoying, but maybe something even more since Burbage does her best to pretend Umbridge is even here, her spine straightening and voice rising.

Umbridge is undeterred though, clearing her throat with that annoying little _ahem_ that Ginny is going to enjoy practicing later.

"As High Inquisitor," Umbridge says, speaking over Burbage, her sickly sweet voice somehow managing to drown her out, "I am evaluating all of the professors." She smiles. "We must make sure educational standards are being met."

Burbage sucks in a breath and nods. "I received your note, Dolores. Now may I continue?"

Umbridge's smile slips, her head lowering down to the clipboard in her hands. She jots down a note of some kind, seeming to take a long time doing it. Only after a protracted couple of minute pass, during which the students are all glancing around at each other in wonderment at the turn of events, does Umbridge finally nod and say, "Proceed."

Burbage's gaze sweeps across the classroom, the students falling silent again. Burbage isn't MacGonagall by any means, but they all like her enough to instantly be on her side in what seems to be some sort of strange battle.

"Now," Burbage says, "Where were we?"

Ginny can see it now, under the uncharacteristic stiffness—Burbage is shaken.

Tobias raises his hand, a rare enough occurrence. But he's always had a soft spot for Burbage. "You were talking about the machines the Muggles use to keep their money in." He gives Smita an exaggerated nudge, lifting his hand to his mouth in an elaborate aside. "Sounds safer than dealing with Goblins."

The class titters nervously, but Tobias playing the ass has the effect of breaking the tension.

Burbage smiles, some of her typical warmth and good humor appearing again. "Thank you, Tobias. Though we must remember that like Muggles, Goblins have their own unique culture that is often misunderstood by wizards."

Abnormally loud sounds of scribbling echoes from the back of the room. Ginny glances behind her to see Umbridge shaking her head and furiously writing notes.

Having recovered her poise though, Burbage seems to refuse to let Umbridge unsettle her again. She pushes ahead with every appearance of ignoring the intrusion entirely, and the students do their best to follow suit.

"All right, students. Good work today," Burbage says at the end of the hour. "Remember that you owe me ten inches on Muggle credit and lending practices next class!"

In noisy rush, the students gather up their things, giving Umbridge wide berth. Umbridge approaches Burbage, and together they disappear into the office attached to the side of the classroom.

Ginny pretty much thinks that's the end of it until she hears Burbage's voice raised in what sounds like outrage. She deliberately slows in the packing up of her things, but Tobias isn't as subtle, simply getting up and pressing his ear up against the door. The door is too thick for casual eavesdropping though, to judge from Tobias' curse.

Ginny pulls a few long thin strands out of her bag, holding them out to Smita and Tobias.

They star back at her in confusion, and not a little alarm.

"A Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes prototype," she whispers, holding one end up to her ear and sliding the other end under the door.

Smita doesn't hesitate to copy Ginny, stepping up next to her. Tobias looks dubious, but his curiosity wins out.

His eyes widen as the conversation becomes completely clear. "I'll take twenty," he mouths to her.

Ginny smiles, her attention quickly diverted by Umbridge's sickly sweet voice.

"I wonder in your defense of Muggles and Goblins if you aren't doing your students a great disservice, making them think they are harmless and not to be taken seriously."

Burbage's voice is hard. "I would never paint the issue so one-sided. Though I think teaching them intolerance would be the greater sin."

"I see," Umbridge says in a tone that betrays a great deal of disapproval. "We must be careful, don't you think, not to put the wrong information in the children's heads."

"The _wrong_ information?" Burbage repeats, sounding nonplussed.

"Yes," Umbridge says. "We are the grownups. We must decide what they should and should not know. We wouldn't want them to become…confused."

There is a protracted silence, the scratch of a quill the only sound. "No," Burbage eventually says, her voice sounding flat and completely unfamiliar. "We wouldn't want that."

"I will look over the rest of your curriculum for the year and give you my notes. But I really think there won't be any need to talk so much about Muggle art."

Hearing the shuffle of papers and the finality of that last statement, they pull back from the door, and scramble out of the classroom.

* * *

><p>In Defense Against the Dark Arts the next day, Ginny watches Umbridge.<p>

She'd thought it was kind of a lark, copying out of the text those first few weeks in DADA. Stupid, but something that gave her time to think about Quidditch, to come up with new formations and drills. Only now that's she's really paying attention does it register just what a colossal waste of time DADA is going to be this year.

Twenty minutes into another lesson spent copying out of the droll text, Ginny is about ready to start yelling herself. She has a tiny bit more sympathy for Harry's infamous outbursts now, even if she still questions his methods.

She carefully shades in mustaches on the beaming faces in the illustrations of her text. _Don't be a sneaker, go tell a teacher! _They try to glare at her from under their new inky hairdos, but their faces seem stuck in perpetual pleasure, giving them a sort of demented look.

It should be funny, but it's really just frustrating. Her hand feels empty, sitting in this classroom without a wand.

_You know why this is important_.

* * *

><p>Back in the common room, Smita and Ginny are getting a little work done before dinner while Tobias has his nose buried in a book. At least Ginny is <em>trying<em> to get some work done. Her attention just doesn't want to stick, the scene in Burbage's classroom running over and over again in her mind.

She sighs, abandoning her quill. "Why is Umbridge here?"

Smita looks up from her essay.

"Well, obviously not to teach us defense," Tobias says, coming out from behind his book. He says it like this is a no-brainer, and Ginny feels a bit stupid, that she'd let herself get so wrapped up in Quidditch that she hadn't seen any of this.

She presses on. "But then why?"

Smita shrugs. "Maybe Dumbeldore couldn't find anyone better."

But that didn't sit right with Ginny. Seemingly cursed position or not, Ginny doesn't think Dumbledore would be careless enough to leave them with someone useless like Umbridge, not _this_ year of all years.

The year Voldemort is back.

That can't just be a coincidence. Can it?

But that reasoning leads her down a path where Umbridge is somehow working for Voldemort, and it's a ridiculous thought. Tom would dismiss her as ludicrous.

Tobias shifts forward, his posture belying the casualness of his words. "Why does it matter why she's here? Just another bad teacher, right?"

He is staring at her, his gaze penetrating, and she can tell there is a completely different question right there on the tip of his tongue. The same one that has been poised there all year. One the general code of privacy has kept him from asking.

No one here gives information away for free.

"Just say it," Ginny pushes. As much as he wants to ask her, she _needs_ him to ask. She thinks maybe she's needed it for a long time.

"Is Potter telling the truth?" he says, voice low. "About the Dark Lord?"

For a moment, Ginny imagines asking Tobias why he calls him the Dark Lord. Because his parents do, no doubt. It all gets so confused in her head sometimes that she just finds it easier to think Voldemort. But maybe that's because she's never been able to separate him from Tom. He isn't some vague threat to her; he's _real_.

"I think he is," Ginny says, and it all seems to hit home as she admits it out loud—the confusion and fear that she has been doing so much to ignore and pretend doesn't exist.

She nods, voice growing firmer as she forces herself to think on it, on Hermione's whispered words in the dark, on the grave lines etched into wizards' faces as they passed through Grimmauld Place. "He _is_ back."

A war has begun, no matter what Umbridge tries to say otherwise. It isn't even about believing Harry; it's about what she's seen. About a secret organization of wizards, strained conversations in the halls. About Dumbledore and her Mum and Dad, and the way Percy left. It's all of it.

She's been playing make-believe as much as anyone else, and she's sick with it, with the breaking of that promise she made to herself as she scrubbed ink off her hands at the end of her first year. A promise not to take the path of least resistance just because it was easiest.

Smita flips their useless DADA text closed with a thump. "And now Umbridge is High Inquisitor."

_We are the grownups. We must decide what they should and should not know._

"Yes," Ginny says.

She still doesn't know what that means.

An hour later, Ginny is walking alone down to the Great Hall for dinner when Antonia falls into step next to her, arm winding through hers.

Ginny looks over at her in surprise, but keeps walking, knowing better than to try to fathom the intentions of Antonia.

"Power," Antonia eventually says.

Ginny frowns, feeling yet again like she's walking into the middle of a conversation.

"Power," Antonia repeats, looking bemused by her confusion. "It's why Umbridge is here."

Ginny doesn't even bother to try to be surprised that Antonia has obviously heard their conversation. She should know better than to talk about private things in the common room.

"Power," Ginny repeats. She thinks back on Umbridge in Burbage's classroom. Being late, writing loudly, making Burbage wait for her permission to start. Is that what power really looks like?

And to what end? To take Burbage's job? Umbridge is already a professor, what would she care? Maybe she wants to be Headmaster? Or something more?

Ginny is pretty sure she's still missing something, but at least now she has someone she can ask. "Whose power?"

Antonia smiles approvingly as if Ginny's question is impressive when it's really just born of confusion. "Dumbledore says the Dark Lord has returned. The Minister of Magic says he's a liar. Only one of them can be right."

"Or seem to be right," Ginny says.

Antonia laughs, her hand squeezing Ginny's arm. "You're finally starting to catch on."

Ginny scowls, but doesn't let her annoyance derail her. The Minister of Magic. Ginny hadn't made that connection. Umbridge isn't here for herself. This isn't about school or students or even who is Headmaster. This is about Dumbledore and Harry and Voldemort and the people who say they are liars. It has been all along, just not in the way she thought.

Ginny glances at Antonia. "What does the minister think Dumbledore is going to do?"

She shrugs. "Doesn't know, does he? And that's the problem."

No, he doesn't know. The only way he could know would be to plant someone here, to plant someone who could decide what the students should and shouldn't be taught. To make sure Dumbledore doesn't make a move against the Ministry.

"Umbridge," Ginny says, everything circling back to the beginning.

Not just teacher, but inquisitor.

"It's a misstep," Antonia says, arm slipping out from Ginny's as they approach the hall.

Ginny looks at her in askance.

"To mistake control for power. One never has as much control as they think." She lifts a book to her chest, clutching it there for a second before turning away from Ginny. Just long enough for Ginny to work out the runes pressed into the worn leather cover.

_Advanced Defensive Magicks _

They never have as much control as they think.

* * *

><p>Ginny is wearily trudging back from a prolonged catch up homework session in the library when she turns around a corner and runs smack into someone.<p>

She jerks back, putting a hand out to the wall to steady herself, already apologizing, just to have the other person speak over her.

"Sorry. Are you okay?"

It's Harry, looking nearly as bleary as Ginny feels. "Yeah," she says. "I'm fine. I should have been looking where I was going." She smiles in apology, only to notice that Harry has one hand cradled to his chest, the white cloth tied around it seeping red.

"Merlin," she breathes. "Are _you_ okay?"

Harry starts, shoving his hand behind his back. "It's nothing. Just a little accident."

His face is red though, and she thinks that's not just the lie he is so clearly is telling her, but something of anger and embarrassment too. Ginny leans back slightly to look down the hall behind him, and there it is, a door with a shiny plaque bearing the name Dolores Umbridge.

It takes a moment to all come together, his hand, Umbridge's office, joking about his detentions.

_Gave him a zillion hours of detention, writing lines._

Ginny reaches for Harry's arm, ignoring his protest, ripping the handkerchief off his hand. Under the oozing blood, she can just barely make out the words. _I must not tell lies._

She stares down at Harry's bleeding hand and begins to understand that maybe this is what war really looks like. Not stirring speeches and two armies lined up with opposing uniforms, but pain and lies and evil hiding in plain sight.

War is about secrets. She should have known that, should have understood. Hadn't she spent the summer in the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix? She was too busy feeling left out and scared and small, when she should have just been _paying attention_.

Harry recovers enough to snatch his hand back, wrapping it back up with furious jerks. "This isn't any of your business, Ginny."

Maybe not, but he's just another person telling what she shouldn't know, what she can and can't understand.

She squares her shoulders, but doesn't apologize, the decision finally making itself. "I'll see you on Saturday, Harry."

Because she knows why this is important.

* * *

><p>On Saturday, she bundles up and trudges to the Hog's Head. It's easy to shake off Tobias, and Smita's always been one to understand the need for space.<p>

Of course, when she arrives, it's not quite the small gathering of students she expects. She tells herself she's prepared for the way heads turn and gazes bore into her skin with suspicion. She tugs on her green scarf and ignores them.

Fred and George greet her with self-satisfied smirks as if taking her presence as proof of her blood. She can't explain why exactly that grates, just turns away from them and moves towards Luna and her vacant smile of welcome instead.

"Ginny," she says, pleasure blooming in her cheeks. "If you have no where else to sit, you may sit by me."

Ginny plops down next to Luna. "Sure you want to be seen with me?"

She looks confused, almost a little stricken, and Ginny immediately regrets the joke.

"Never mind," Ginny says as others continue to file in, sliding dark looks in her direction. "Is that a new necklace?"

Luna spins off on some tale about her father's research and not for the first time, Ginny wonders what it must be like, seeing the world through Luna's eyes. It's a welcome distraction.

The Hog's Head is nearly at capacity by the time Hermione stands up, clearing her throat.

Ginny watches as Harry gets more and more indignant as it becomes clear that most people are here for the freak show, the inside scoop on what really happened at the end of last year. Some of the students are still looking for proof of the coming dangers, others just want to know why Harry, of all people, should be the one to teach them.

It's probably inevitable that a list of Harry's mad adventures come out. Philosopher Stones and Triwizard Tournaments. But also Ginny's own sordid past.

"Didn't you kill a basilisk with that sword second year?" someone interjects.

She very carefully doesn't look at Harry.

He hedges his answers and tries to make it all sound like no big deal, but he knows what it's like, this uncertain world they are heading into, and the other students in the room aren't so stupid not to realize that.

At the first mention of keeping secrets, heads not so discreetly turn in Ginny's direction. One of the Hufflepuff girls leans over to whisper in the ear of the boy next to her, the sibilance of Slytherin hissing around the room like an accusation.

Ginny surges to her feet, some of the students nearby flinching away at the unexpected movement. Even Hermione looks a little wary, like she's wondering what Ginny is about to do. It occurs to her that even they don't really know anything about her. Not really.

Ginny paces up to stand in front of the table. Harry meets her eyes over the piece of treasonous paper.

Picking up the quill, Ginny signs her name—big, bold loops and unapologetic slashes.

"Who's next?" she asks, holding up the quill.

* * *

><p>The next morning Educational Decree Number 24 appears, banning all student clubs, and there is no way that can be a coincidence. The entire hall is buzzing with it. Ginny watches the less clever of the students from the Hog's Head yesterday try to swarm the table where Harry and Hermione and Ron are eating. Hermione's face nearly turns purple with frustration as she tries to subtly signal them away.<p>

So much for keeping the club a secret.

Terry Boot and another Ravenclaw get up from the table next to Slytherin's, looking like they may be heading that way too. Ginny pulls her wand, pointing it back under her arm as they pass. She whispers a Trip Jinx, both boys stumbling into each other in a heap.

A clamor erupts, the fallen boys protesting, other Ravenclaw jumping to their feet, and the nearby Slytherin enjoying a good laugh. Everyone is looking around trying to figure out what has just happened.

Under cover of the chaos, Ginny gives each of the boys a pointed look. She thought Ravenclaws were supposed to be clever.

They glare at her, but when they get back to their feet, they walk off in a different direction, _away_ from Harry and the rest.

"Gits," Ginny mutters under her breath. She glances around the Hall, glad to see that the commotion provided enough time for everyone else to come to their senses. At the Gryffindor table, Ron is frowning at Ginny, but Hermione looks relieved.

Smita slides Ginny a look, like she's wondering where Ginny's sudden interest in picking fights with other students came from.

Ginny gives her a tight smile. "They were giving Luna a hard time yesterday."

Across the table, Tobias' eyebrow shoots up. "Ginny Weasley, school crusader. I didn't even see you get that curse off." He sounds impressed.

"Practice makes perfect," Ginny mutters, trying to ignore the unpleasant gnaw of something uncomfortably like guilt in her stomach.

_We have to be able to protect ourselves._

"Ginny?" Smita asks.

She's saved from coming up with another lie when Bletchley slaps a hand on her shoulder. "Extra practice this afternoon, Six. Poor Gryffindors haven't gotten their team approved by Umbridge yet." It had been the no doubt unintended side effect of the new decree—all Quidditch teams had to get permission to be reformed.

"You already got ours?" she asks.

"Yeah," he says, waving a hand. "It was a breeze. So I snagged Gryffindor's pitch time."

"Great," Ginny says, forcing herself to smile. It sucks that Umbridge is making them all do this, but they can sure use the extra practice.

Gryffindor's woes aren't her problem.

* * *

><p>Two days later as Ginny leaves the Hall after lunch, she spots Hermione hovering in the corridor.<p>

"Give me a minute," Ginny says to Tobias and Smita.

They give Hermione a curious glance, but don't hesitate to continue on without her.

Hermione lowers her head towards Ginny. "First meeting is tonight, 8pm."

She nods. She'll barely have time to finish practice and grab a bite before, but she knows this is important.

"Meet on the seventh floor. You know the Barnabas the Barmy tapestry?"

Ginny frowns, being familiar enough with that part of the castle to know there aren't any classrooms or anything up there, but Hermione has already strode off, so she can't really ask.

Sure enough, when Ginny first gets to the corridor that evening, her hair still slightly damp from the shower, at first glance there's nothing but stone walls. Then, as Ginny approaches closer, a metal door seems to almost…bleed into place. It looks fortified and impenetrable, but opens easily under her hand, like it recognizes her. It closes silently behind her, leaving her standing in a large classroom full of pillows and strange contraptions on the wall.

Most of the students from the Hog's Head are already there, heads turning to glance at her and then quickly away.

Her brothers barely notice her, already embroiled in mischief, and Hermione just gives her a distracted smile before sticking her head back in a giant bookshelf. In the face of such indifference and outright hostility, Ginny is beginning to lose her nerve, especially when Harry has everyone pair up to practice.

Luckily before she can do anything stupid, a boy she recognizes from the train walks up to her. He looks about as sheepish as Ginny feels.

"Uh, do you, um, have a partner?" he asks, some of the words swallowed and awkward to the point of intelligibility.

Ginny swallows her anger and discomfort and takes a leap. "Not unless you'd like to be my partner."

He smiles, looking relieved enough to almost fumble his wand. Ginny wonders what she may have gotten herself into. "Great," he says, holding out his hand. "I'm Neville."

His palm is a little sweaty when she takes it. "Ginny."

"Yeah," he says, nodding enthusiastically. "Ron's sister, right?"

"Yeah," Ginny says, used to being known as one or another of her brothers' sister for her entire life.

They start out pretty simple, learning and perfecting basic protection spells, but Harry is thorough and endlessly patient. She's surprised by it and more than once has to remind herself that she doesn't actually know Harry Potter all that well.

As for Neville, he's a little hopeless, but determined, never giving up no matter how many times he fails. He relaxes around her after a while, like maybe he'd been waiting for her to hex him when he wasn't looking, or say something nasty about his questionable wand skills.

He pauses once after his spell has done little more than make some of Ginny's hair stand on end, looking down at his wand as if wondering if it has forsaken him. "My Da's," he explains, a world of hidden currents in the simple words.

Ginny used (stole) her brothers' wands a few times here and there over the years, just to try them out, but nothing has ever felt as right in her hand as her own wand.

Neville straightens his shoulders. "Let's try it again."

Ginny nods.

Hopeless, but determined. She can admire that.

* * *

><p>Ginny stifles a yawn and tries not to panic about just how far behind she's getting in her studies. Between Quidditch and the DA, she's bound to fail at least one of her courses. Runes, probably. They all look exactly the same this late at night.<p>

Tobias and Smita have the nerve to look completely relaxed and caught up. Gits.

Tobias casually turns a page of the book he's reading. "Muggles," he says with a shake of his head. "They can be deliciously twisted."

Ginny glances at the title, something about a prince called Machiavelli. She's halfway through another book Tobias lent her, all about the Muggle art of war. It's more useful on the Quidditch pitch than she initially expected. Technically they shouldn't be reading either of the books, but Tobias smuggled them in after letting his curiosity drag him into a Muggle bookshop over the summer.

It's strange what counts as contraband at Hogwarts.

Officially, Muggle books have to be carefully vetted through the school, the professors and Madam Pince deciding what is and isn't appropriate for the students. But it's not like that's ever stopped a Slytherin before. Ginny's heard rumors that Antonia has an entire closet of banned ancient books somewhere in the dorms.

She glances over at the sixth year sitting near the fire, wondering if she might ever let Ginny take a look.

"_Before all else, be armed_." Tobias looks up from his book. "Clearly Umbridge has never read this."

Ginny snorts, the thought of prim and proper Umbridge reading something not ministry-approved completely ridiculous.

Tobias nudges their DADA textbook with the smiling, vacant student faces beaming up at them. "But maybe it can be used as a shield somehow?"

"It's dense enough," Smita comments.

"Who are you calling dense?" Tobias quips.

Smita doesn't rise to the bait, simply shakes her head and tries not to look amused.

"Well," Tobias says, stretching his arms above his head. "Maybe copying out of the text over and over again will increase the strength of my wand arm."

"A fat lot of good that will do if you don't know how to do anything with it," Smita counters.

Complaining about Umbridge, or any professor, really, is just par for the course around the common room, but with these two it's more than just mere boredom. Ginny can see their hands twitch with restlessness—powerlessness. Not so different from her own.

She thinks of an evening with Neville, learning to protect herself, and feels that unbearable twinge once again, finally knowing exactly what it is: guilt.

"Would you be…interested in doing something to change that?" Ginny asks, face still buried in her runes text.

Tobias leans forward and hooks a finger over the spine of her book. "What exactly are we talking about?"

Smita is just giving Ginny a look like _it's about time_.

Ginny gnaws her lip. "It's dangerous," she says, just so they know what they are getting into. "And has to be kept completely secret."

Rather than being put off by that, Tobias only looks more interested.

Ginny glances around the common room. "I can't really tell you more now." She looks at Smita. "But I will."

Smita nods, putting a hand on Tobias' arm when he might push further.

"Okay," he says, gathering his things up. "But I'm holding you to that."

Ginny scribbles an ending to her Arithmancy essay and vows to do better next time. Pushing to her feet, she trudges blearily towards her room.

"You know," Antonia says as Ginny passes by, not looking up from her book. "You're getting a lot more interesting this year."

Ginny isn't sure what to say to that.

* * *

><p>Ginny slips into Potions at the last possible moment thanks to a whispered conversation with Hermione out in the halls.<p>

Her potion partner Bridget sends Ginny a slightly scandalized look, but is kept from saying anything by the arrival of Snape. His eyes sweep the students, lingering on Ginny for just a second longer, as if he _knows_ she was almost late. Ginny meets his gaze squarely.

"Open your texts to page 57. Today we will be testing your skills at a Wit Sharpening Potion." Snape's eyes stray to the Gryffindor in the classroom. "Though I fear not even a potion can sharpen what is nonexistent in the first place."

Some of the Slytherin snicker appreciatively while the Gryffindor just glower silently, knowing better than to protest. Ginny glances across the room, catching Colin Creevey's eye. They'd met at the DA meeting last week. He's cheerful and earnest almost to the point of annoyance, but far from witless. Not that it should bother her.

She doesn't smile, and neither does Colin.

She glances away, only to find Snape standing over her desk. "Is there something wrong, Miss Weasley?" he asks.

Her book is still unopened in front of her.

"Trust me, Professor," Tobias butts in, filling the awkward silence, "her wit is already sharp enough to cut." The boys near him snicker, nodding along in agreement.

"Silence," Snape says, but his lips are curved in that indulgent amusement he always reserves for his House.

Ginny takes advantage of the distraction to flip open her text to the correct page, pulling out the needed ingredients.

"You have one hour," Snape says, giving Ginny one last long glance before moving back to his desk.

"Are you okay?" Smita asks out of the corner of her mouth. On the other side of Smita, Bridget sniffs loudly in disapproval.

Ginny sees Tobias move back towards the cupboards. "We need more wartcap powder from the stores," she mutters, getting to her feet.

Tobias gives her a wary look as she approaches, like he thinks she's going to tell him off.

Ginny finds the jar of wartcap powder, carefully siphoning out a small amount onto a piece of paper. "That thing I promised to tell you about?" she whispers.

Tobias's eyebrow lifts. "Yeah?"

"Tonight, after dinner. Meet me by the sticking step at 7:30."

Stepping away before he can pester her any further, Ginny feels the guilt in her stomach twist into something almost worse. She keeps walking.

* * *

><p>Later that night as they linger in the hallway one corridor down from the Room of Requirement, Tobias frowns when he catches sight of Harry coming towards them, but doesn't say anything. Ginny's incredibly thankful for that. She's been feeling his patience draw thinner and thinner as they stood out here. He's still convinced this is some sort of prank she's concocted.<p>

"Stay here," Ginny says to Tobias and Smita, moving down the hall to intercept Harry. "Harry."

"Ginny?" he asks, looking up as if surprised to see anyone here as early as him.

Ginny blows out a breath, fairly blurting the words. "I know more people who want to join."

"Yeah?" he asks, one eyebrow lifting.

"I haven't given them any details yet," she says. After all, she's certain that was no simple piece of paper they'd signed. (She knows the dangers of paper and ink more than anyone.) Besides, even if Harry is rash enough to damn the consequences, Hermione is too smart to let him.

Ginny glances over at Smita and Tobias standing just out of earshot.

Harry follows her gaze, his expressive face not hiding his moment of shock. From his reaction, one would think she just asked him to train a bunch of Death Eaters.

"They want to learn," she says through gritted teeth.

Harry doesn't seem to buy that, giving her a look like she's missing the big picture. "They're Sly-," he starts to say, biting off the word as he realizes just who he's speaking to.

_Know your enemy._

Ginny stares back at him, feeling a weird sort of calm come over her. It feels like a relief to admit the truth—she isn't at all surprised. She knows this is why she hadn't told Tobias and Smita about the first meeting in the Hog's Head. Because she must have suspected this very reaction even then.

"Ginny," Harry says, trying to backpedal. "I didn't mean-."

"Yeah, you did." She lets out a huff, shaking her head in irritation, or maybe just annoyance with herself for ever hoping for something different. "You, who talk about banding together, protecting ourselves, finding strength in unity."

"I don't have a problem with you joining, Ginny," he's quick to say, as if this small gesture absolves him of the larger crime. She knows the only reason he's willing to accept her is because she's a Weasley. He thinks he knows all about Weasleys.

Not this Weasley.

"You're such a hypocrite," she says, voice flat and matter of fact, but he still flinches back as if she'd yelled it. She wonders if that's the horror of a Slytherin having the audacity to question his vaunted moral position. The memory of him staring back at her in the Chamber comes rushing back, Tom's voice whispering in her ear.

_You don't fit his careful columns of good versus Slytherin. _

Ginny steps closer to Harry, anger thrumming in her veins. "There's one thing you should remember, Potter. _I'm_ a Slytherin. Not an aberration, not a mix up. A Slytherin. So if you're writing them off, you'd bloody well better write me off as well."

He stares back at her, stunned, maybe by her words, by her gall. She doesn't really care. Spinning on her heel, she strides away from him, making a nice dramatic go of it.

"Come on," she says to Tobias and Smita, both of them following her without comment when they see her face.

Back in their common room, Tobias flops down on a couch.

"He wouldn't let you tell us," Smita surmises, rightly putting all the pieces together.

"No," Ginny confirms.

"Did he have a reason?" Tobias demands, voice fairly dripping with aggression.

Ginny just looks back at him, leaving the words unspoken.

"Of course." He pushes back to his feet. "Sainted Potter-," he spits.

"Don't," Ginny says wearily, her own anger already draining in the face of pure exhaustion.

Tobias spins to look at her. "Why the hell not?"

Ginny sighs, that uncomfortable burning sensation back in her stomach. "He's in the wrong here, I know that. But just…don't."

Tobias gives her a long, sharp look that is no less painful than Harry's had been. After a while his jaw tightens, but he nods, seeming to accept that she has her limits.

Smita watches Tobias go without comment.

"Bugger it," Ginny swears, dropping her head back to the couch and slapping her hands over her face.

"You're disappointed in him," Smita observes.

Ginny doesn't know which boy she means, and isn't sure she wants to.

In History of Magic the next day, Ginny watches Smita trace complex runes on the edges of her parchment, her attention clearly a thousand kilometers away from the Goblin Wars.

Ginny smiles fondly, absently thinking Smita and Hermoine might be friends if they ever had the chance to meet.

Except.

Ginny's smile fades.

* * *

><p>Ginny has more than enough to do between homework and Quidditch to keep her blissfully busy the next week. She doesn't bother giving Harry Potter and his bloody club a second thought. Not until Hermione pulls her to a stop in the halls.<p>

"There's a meeting tonight," she whispers, watching Ginny closely. "Will you be there?" Clearly she noticed her absence from the last meeting.

Ginny shakes her head. "I can't."

Hermione's eyes narrow. "What's happened?"

"Nothing," Ginny says, not surprised Harry hasn't told her about their fight. He probably never gave it a second thought. "Nothing's happened. I'm just really busy right now."

The lies are easy. It's nice to be on this side of them for once.

Or so she tells herself.

She tries not to pay attention to the clock that evening, but despite the load of homework she has to lose herself in, she becomes increasingly short-tempered as the clock ticks towards eight. Both Tobias and Smita have long since wandered off to leave her to her sulk.

It's stupid, really. What does she care about the stupid DA or what Harry bloody Potter might think of her?

Right before eight, a shadow falls across the book she isn't reading.

"Come on."

Ginny looks up, surprised to see Antonia standing over her. "What?"

Antonia gives her an impatient look like she's dropping the ball. "Astoria's going to play her harp."

Ginny frowns, sure that Astoria has never publicly played before. She could be in the choir if she wanted, or in the musical chorale. But most Slytherin aren't big on participation.

Antonia raises one perfect, dark eyebrow at Ginny when she continues to do nothing but stare. "Well?"

There are a million reasons to keep sitting here pouting, but all of them suddenly feel rather stupid. Besides, Ginny is big enough to admit she's always found Antonia fascinating. Ginny quickly shoves her books back into her bag and gets to her feet.

Antonia leads her to what Ginny had up to now always assumed was a broom closet. The older girl taps the doorframe with her wand, murmuring something under her breath. When the door opens, it reveals a narrow staircase leading downwards.

Ginny peers down into the dark space. She may find Antonia fascinating, but that doesn't mean she doesn't also find her scary as hell. "Where are we going?"

Antonia rolls her eyes. "Stop being a ninny." She gives Ginny a little shove down the stairs.

Ginny lets herself get propelled down the small spiraling staircase. There are torches every half twist, and by the time Ginny gets to a doorway at the bottom, she's a little dizzy. The door opens out into a large, comfortable room. She has just long enough to pick out an array of instruments on one wall, cases full of books on another, and in the back what looks like chalkboards or easels, before she becomes aware that every person in the room is staring at her, most with varying levels of suspicion.

There aren't many people, all girls, including Caroline, Astoria, the Carrow twins, and a few older girls, but all Ginny can think of is being thirteen years old and surrounded by a crowd of tall, masked girls—Gregor's silently screaming face.

Antonia appears then, winding her arm through Ginny's. "Shall we get started?" she says, something like a challenge in her voice.

The rest of the girls exchange glances, but seem to accept Ginny's presence for now. At the center of the room, Astoria settles down with her harp, the rest of the girls sitting on the rich, comfortable couches arranged around her.

Ginny quickly takes a seat next to Caroline, thinking the less attention she draws to herself right now, the better. As Astoria tunes the harp, doing a few runs of quick notes, Ginny tries to surreptitiously get a better look around the room. There's a full potions station tucked in a dark corner she hadn't noticed at first, and next to it, a strange contraption made of tubes and glass beakers, a clear liquid quietly collecting in a large bottle.

She's squinting to make out the writing on one of the various chalkboards nearby when Astoria begins to play. Ginny quickly loses any interest in the room.

She's never been a huge music fan. She knows the most popular stuff, suffers silently through Celestina Warbeck during the holidays. Astoria's music is nothing like either of those. Not catchy or boring, but completely absorbing.

Haunting, really.

Ginny manages to forget everything while Astoria plays—this strange room, her homework, stupid Harry, Tobias's anger, secrets too big to keep, and Smita's quiet disappointment. It all just fades in the face of the sounds being coaxed out of the strings.

Before Ginny realizes it, thirty minutes have passed, Astoria quietly standing up from the harp and the other girls offering a few words of praise before moving off to do other things.

Ginny is still sitting rather stunned on the couch when Astoria joins Caroline, arranging her robes carefully as if they are in the most elegant of concert halls.

"That was…beautiful," Ginny says. Maybe not in the traditional, comfortable sense, but beautiful all the same.

Astoria smiles, clearly pleased but trying not to show it.

Ginny's always thought of Astoria as rather cold, like a perfect porcelain doll. She thought maybe that was why Caroline hung out with her, hoping a little of that polish might rub off on her and make her mother happy. But Astoria with her harp is an entirely different being, someone incredibly more understandable. She comes to life.

Caroline and Astoria lower their heads to talk to each other, and Ginny gathers enough nerve to get up and give the room a closer look. She's examining some of the chalkboards in the back when Antonia appears by her side.

"The Carrows," Antonia says. "Determined to be animagi." She peers at the equations. "Looks like they might be getting pretty close."

Ginny tries not to look surprised that so much has been going on right under her nose without her realizing, but Antonia's got an annoying smirk on her face all the same.

Ginny moves further towards the back of the room, peeking at some canvases leaning against the wall. They are covered in dark swirling images, eyes and faces peering out of the darkness.

"Don't touch those," a voice growls.

Ginny turns to find Milicent Baulstrode uncomfortably close, her face twisted with malice. Ginny draws back with a start, her hand brushing against the comforting weight of her wand in her pocket. She darts a look over Milicent's shoulder to Antonia. The older girl merely looks away, clearly not willing to come to her rescue. Not that Ginny really expected her to.

"I'm sorry," Ginny says, taking one careful step back. "I was just curious. Did you do them?" Like Astoria's music, the images are far from comfortable, but still clearly very good. She doesn't really know how to put that into words, and doesn't get a chance to.

Milicent glowers at her. "None of your damn business."

Ginny puts up her hands, perfectly able to believe Milicent capable of violence. "Understood." She retreats as quickly as she can without looking like she's fleeing.

"Wow," Ginny says when she gets back to Antonia's side. "What a thoroughly unpleasant person."

Antonia flicks something off her sweater. "Yeah. Maybe."

"Maybe?" Ginny echoes incredulously.

To her surprise, Antonia looks disappointed.

"What?"

Antonia rolls her shoulders in a move far too elegant to be called a shrug, her face now indifferent. "I would have thought you, of all people, would understand that things aren't always as they seem."

With that, Antonia moves off to talk to other girls, leaving Ginny standing there feeling like she's failed some unspoken test. They mill about for another hour, and Ginny slips away as soon as she can. No one seems to notice.

"You went to The Parlor?" Smita asks later that night, looking impressed. Ginny can hear the capitalization in her voice.

"Yeah," she says, wondering now why she'd never heard of it before since it is clearly a big deal. Not that it really matters. "Something tells me I won't be asked again though."

Smita raises an eyebrow, but doesn't ask.

Ginny nudges her with her elbow. "Wouldn't want to leave you with no one but Tobias to hang out with, after all."

Smita shoves at her, still trying to pretend the idea doesn't appeal to her.

Ginny doesn't sleep well that night, dreaming of Milicent Baullstrode playing a cello with a Dark Mark floating above her head.

She looks straight at Ginny, her bow dragging with a groan across the strings. "Hypocrite."

* * *

><p>Solitude is a habit Ginny has never shaken since her first year. She loves hanging around with Smita and Tobias, being in the middle of things, but sometimes she just wants a minute to herself, a place to retreat to. When she does, she comes here, to her secret hiding place. The odd little cloister is one of the few things she learned from Tom that she has claimed as her own.<p>

It appears open to the sky above, sunlight radiating in, even though Ginny knows there are at least five stories of castle directly above. It feels like it once used to be a vast courtyard that was slowly squeezed and run over by the expanding castle. Now it is crowded with warped and twisted columns, moss and various plants growing across large broken blocks of marble lying on their sides. There's a soft trickle of water coming from somewhere, but try as she may, she's never been able to find the source.

It feels ancient and forgotten, and somehow completely her own.

Which is exactly why Ginny can't explain how Harry finds it. Hearing a noise, Ginny glances up to see him barely visible through the tiny sliver of space that serves as the entrance. She knows he can't have seen her yet, and seriously considers ducking out of sight.

He taps a piece of parchment with his wand before tucking it away into his pocket. Taking a few steps out into the cloister, he comes to a stop, eyes skimming the space as if looking for something.

It takes a moment for him to locate her among the intricate columns, his eyes settling on her as if he had fully expected her to be there.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi," she echoes, voice completely devoid of either welcome or censure.

He seems heartened by the fact that she hasn't hexed him though, stepping between the columns and scrabbling over blocks to get closer to her. She petulantly doesn't bother pointing out the clear path to one side.

"What is this place?" he asks when he finally reaches her.

She shrugs, glancing around. "I'm not sure."

He makes a big show of looking up at the lattice of marble above them, but Ginny gets the sense he's just stalling. He looks back down to find her watching him. "Charms homework?" he says, gesturing at her book.

She lifts an eyebrow at him. Does he really think she's going to believe he came all this way to find her just to talk about homework? Because it's clear now that this is his goal here. She isn't sure what to think of that.

He grimaces, hands disappearing into his pockets. "Look. Are you coming back to the DA?"

She's missed two meetings now, and she can only think of one reason that would bother him. "If you're here because you're worried I'm going to tell Umbridge…"

"No," Harry interrupts. "That's not-. I don't think you'd ever do that, Ginny."

She closes her book, giving him her full attention. "Why not?"

"What?" he asks, looking flustered.

"Why don't you think I'd tell Umbridge?"

"Because…you just wouldn't."

She tilts her head to one side. "Because I'm a Weasley?"

His mouth opens and closes a couple of times, like he's learned it's best to think his words through when he's talking to her, but can't quite decide what's safe to say. Maybe she'd find that funny if she weren't so annoyed.

"But unfortunately Smita and Tobias aren't. Is that it?"

Harry shifts, having the grace to look uncomfortable. He drops down on a marble block next to her like he's run out of steam. This conversation is clearly not going anywhere near where he expected it to.

"Malfoy," he says, letting the silence stretch long like this one word is an explanation.

"Is a wanker," Ginny supplies for him.

Harry looks at her in surprise.

She shrugs. "It's not like that's a secret. But neither does it have anything to do with this."

"Doesn't it?" he asks, his gaze sharpening like he's decided he's not going to let her get away with anything either.

"He isn't Slytherin," Ginny says. It's the same mistake she'd made, in the beginning. The same mistake she keeps making, if she's honest.

And that, more than anything, is why she finds it harder to be angry with Harry today. She's too busy being angry with herself. She knows why she really lost her temper with him. Because he'd dared to say out loud what she'd hated herself for thinking. For suspecting. There was a reason she didn't take Smita and Tobias with her to the first meeting at the Hog's Head, wasn't there? A reason she'd actually hesitated to tell Smita about her summer, her _real_ summer.

She's just as guilty as he is.

It really pisses her off.

She takes a breath, looking over at Harry. "Have you ever considered that blind hatred of Slytherin isn't really any different than Draco's hatred of Muggleborns?"

Harry frowns.

Ginny picks at the edge of her parchment. "Look. I think the DA is important. I want to go back."

"But?" he prompts, apparently not quite so hopelessly dense as her brother.

"But not if the only reason you let me join is because I'm a Weasley. And not without Smita and Tobias."

This whole thing has been about being able to protect themselves, and Ginny just isn't willing to leave her friends out of that. Not any more.

She gets up, carefully piling her books and quills and parchment back into her bag. Harry watches her without comment.

She doesn't know him all that well, not really. She doesn't know if he's going to think about anything she's said. But he'd bothered to come find her and talk about this when there wasn't any reason to, and she thinks that must mean something. Like maybe he really is more than just a name.

She pulls her bag over her shoulder. "Just think about it, will you?"

Harry nods.

She leaves him sitting alone in the cloister.

* * *

><p>The next day, Ginny stifles a curse as her bag hits the ground with a thump and clang as she gets shoved from behind. She looks up from her belongings sprawled all over the busy hallway floor to find Harry Potter standing next to her.<p>

"Oops. Sorry," he says, not sounding remotely apologetic.

She glares, wondering if this a sign of how things are going to be between them now. Antagonistic. Clearly she'd been overly optimistic, thinking he might take her words to heart.

Before she can formulate a response, he's on the floor, corralling all her things back into her bag. Frowning, she drops down next to him, swiftly snatching the embarrassingly chewed quills from his hands.

"I've got it," she snaps.

He doesn't argue, stacking up the last of her books.

She's about to push to her feet and stalk off with an appropriate air of menace when he touches her elbow.

"You forgot these." He presses something into her hand. She glances down, catching the glint of gold between her fingers before tightening her fist. She thinks she'd know if she had a small fortune in gold rattling around in her bag. What crazy new game is this?

Harry just smiles back at her, and it occurs to Ginny that he's amused, like he's enjoying her confusion.

"Tonight at eight, okay?" he says, voice barely audible.

Rolling the coins around her palm, she carefully counts. One, two, three.

_Three_.

She feels an absurd smile rising on the warmth bubbling up in her chest. But she also notices that people are beginning to stare. Jamming her fist into her pocket, she nods at Harry, giving him a pleasant smile.

Then she shoves him.

He sprawls back on his arse, a stupid look of surprise on his face. He frowns as he rubs at his chest, and Ginny thinks she enjoys seeing him look confused too.

Raising her voice, she pushes to her feet, flicking imaginary dust off her sleeve. "Watch it, Potter," she says, standing over him. "Next time I won't be so forgiving."

She doesn't give him another glance, her step light and springing as she hums to herself.

* * *

><p>Ron, Harry, and Hermione meet them in the hallway in front of the Room of Requirement just after eight. It just looks like a plain stretch of wall at the moment, and she knows Tobias still thinks this is an elaborate prank. Getting him here at all had been an even bigger challenge than convincing Harry.<p>

"We need you to sign this," Hermione says, giving them a hesitant smile and holding out the piece of parchment Ginny recognizes from the Hog's Head, her signature sitting right at the top.

"Why?" Tobias demands, crossing his arms over his chest.

Hermione's smile falters.

"Because she told you to, you git," Ron snaps.

Tobias glares at Ron, but doesn't rise to the bait. Ginny can practically see him filing away the insult for future retaliation. "What is it?" he asks, digging his heels in out of sheer perversity.

"It's your promise that you won't tell anyone what we're about," Hermione explains.

"What, we can't just pinkie swear?" Tobias sneers, clearly well into his total wanker mode.

Harry gives Ginny a pointed look.

"Just shut up and sign it," Ginny says, shoving a quill at Tobias.

He gives her a mutinous glare.

Smita, quiet up to now, is the one to calmly take the parchment from Hermione, her fingers skimming down over the surface. Nodding as if in approval, she lifts her wand, murmuring an incantation. Harry, Ron, and Hermione flinch, their hands flying for their wands.

A writing desk appears in the middle of the hall with a small pop.

Smita eyes the Gryffindors' wands as if to say, 'What did you expect?' They aren't barbarians after all.

Ginny has to bite on her lip not to laugh.

"May I?" Smita asks Ginny, gesturing for the quill.

Ginny hands it over with a small flourish. "Certainly."

Sitting down at the small table, Smita signs her name at the bottom in compact, careful letters. "Tobias?" she asks, holding the quill out for him.

Tobias makes a show of grumbling, but sits down in the vacated seat and signs his name as well.

Smita collects the parchment and vanishes the desk with a flick of her wand. Stepping over to stand next to Hermione, she hands it to her. "This parchment's cursed," she observes.

Hermione blanches.

"It's _what_?" Tobias bites out, voice low and dangerous. Ginny touches his arm.

"Cursed," Smita repeats, clearly unconcerned by this fact.

Harry gives her a speculative look. "Yet you still signed it."

Smita nods. "I would have cursed it too. It's a wise precaution."

Ginny can't lie. She gets a lot of amusement out of how discomforted Hermione and Harry look to get Slytherin approval of their underhandedness.

"What spell did you use?" Smita asks, stepping closer to Hermione.

Hermione's mouth opens and closes a couple of times, her eyes still a little panicked.

"You're right," Smita says, tapping the side of her nose. "It's safer not to let anyone know."

"Should we go inside?" Ginny asks, trying to hide a strangled laugh behind a cough.

"Right," Harry says, moving to pace in front of the wall.

Despite himself, Tobias looks pretty impressed as the doors to the Room of Requirement appear. "Just what the hell have you gotten us in to, Ginevra?"

Harry, Ron, and Hermione walk through the doors, Tobias trailing slightly behind.

"Enjoying yourself?" Ginny whispers, threading her arm through Smita's as they follow.

Smita nods. "Oh, yes. Immensely."

Ginny laughs at the sparkle in Smita's eye. "I'm really glad you're here."

This, at last, feels right.

Inside, stillness invades the room as everyone notices the newcomers in the doorway. A Ravenclaw boy leans over to whisper in the ear of a Hufflepuff girl.

Ginny's jaw clenches.

Harry glances at her, and clears his throat loudly. "We have two new members today. This is Tobias and Smita."

Not exactly gushing, but she appreciates his matter-of-fact tone. He isn't going to justify their presence to anyone. Except maybe to himself.

Harry waits another beat, like maybe he's waiting for someone to greet them. The tension in the room only seems to grow though, until Luna steps forward.

"Oh, hello!" she says, floating over to their side.

"Hi, Luna," Smita says.

Their familiarity with Luna only seems to cement their weirdness with the other members, muttering breaking out all over the room.

Harry gives a smart blow on the whistle hanging around his neck. "Okay, let's get to work. Pair up and let me see how your disarming practice is going."

Neville crosses over to Ginny. "I'm glad you're back," he says.

"Thanks," she says, turning to Tobias and Smita. "This is Neville."

They only nod in return, Tobias still bent out of shape and Smita shy as always.

Ginny smiles at Neville to soften the blow. "Would you mind being my practice partner again?" Ginny asks, leaving Tobias and Smita to work with each other when she sees Harry approach them to help catch them up.

The rest of the meeting goes relatively smoothly, barring the time one of Neville's spells goes awry and makes one of Tobias' legs go numb. Neville looks horrified, Tobias indignant, but then Smita is leaning over him, looking concerned and Tobias seems to forget all about Neville. Stupid berk.

At the end of the meeting, Ginny pretends not to see the way people swarm around Harry. Demanding, no doubt, to know what the hell he was thinking, letting a bunch of Slytherin in. Tries to pretend Fred and George aren't right in there with the rest of them.

Neville gives her an apologetic look, Luna happily unaware of the undercurrents.

Ginny forces a smile on her face and gets Tobias and Smita out of the room as quickly as possible.

Back in the common room, Ginny eyes Tobias, who is clearly fuming. "Are you more angry because of the way they treated us, or because Harry is actually a good teacher?"

Tobias lets out a sigh, dropping an arm over Ginny's shoulders. "Can't I be angry about both at the same time?"

Ginny smiles. "It will get better," she promises.

It has to.

* * *

><p>It doesn't get better. Well, it does for a little while. The others slowly get used to seeing them there, particularly after Tobias stops glaring at people and Smita's quiet competence becomes clear. Only then the first match of the Quidditch season looms closer and closer, and things in the halls outside get nastier and nastier.<p>

Members of the Gryffindor Quidditch team keep ending up in the infirmary, and Ginny isn't so naïve not to know why.

She's in the library studying when she notices Bletchley eying Alicia Spinnet over his books, his wand twisting in his fingers under the desk.

Ginny crosses the room as if looking for another book, bumping Bletchley from behind just in time for the jinx to dong harmlessly off a table leg.

Bletchley spins around in surprise. "What the hell, Six?"

Ginny nods her head back over his shoulder. "Pince was watching."

Bletchley looks back in that direction, but doesn't see the librarian. Probably because she'd never been there in the first place.

"I don't want you to get caught with the match coming up. We need you too much." She stares guilelessly back at him, willing him to call her bluff. She tries to remember those weeks after the Yule Ball last year.

Like everyone else, Slytherin boys tend to be wary of Slytherin girls.

Bletchley shrugs and goes back to his books.

Alicia turns, catching Ginny's eye. Giving her a suspicious look, Alicia gathers her book bag and leaves.

The sooner this first match is over, the better.

* * *

><p>Ginny takes it back. The match itself is even worse than the build up.<p>

She prepared herself for a dirty match, but not for Draco's idea of amusements.

_Weasley was born in a bin…_

She can see Ron's red ears all the way across the pitch. Goyle and Crabbe are snickering, Katie and Alicia glaring back at them with the power of a thousand curses.

Ginny just clenches her jaw and tries to focus down on the match, noticing a similar expression on Harry's face when they pass. She ignores the singing coming out of the stands as best she can, too busy dodging bludgers and trying to keep their score up. Fred and George are long over any hesitance at trying to knock their baby sister off her broom.

The extracurricular antics are distracting Warrington. The song, the clearly one-sided commentary blaring out over the field, Ginny doesn't know nor care.

"Oi," she bellows as she flies by him. "Get your head in the game!"

She's worked too damn hard this year on offensive drills and plays to fall short now. The only way to win this is to go up enough points before Harry catches the snitch. She can't depend on Draco.

Besides, not giving Ron enough time to think is probably the nicest thing she can do for him.

Ginny signals Thompson to get in formation and makes another run on the Gryffindor goals.

Despite Ginny's best efforts and even Ron's abysmal goalie performance (she ruthlessly smashes down any sympathy), they can't keep the score up enough. Harry has the snitch and the game is over.

Ginny only has enough time to curse under her breath and petulantly fling the now useless Quaffle to the ground before she sees the triumphant Harry get nailed from behind by a bludger. Ginny winces as he hits the ground.

She'd fly over and give Crabbe a piece of her mind, but Madam Hooch seems to be doing a bang up job, and frankly Ginny is too tired to deal with any more shit at the moment.

"Idiots," she mutters under her breath, landing near Warrington and Thompson.

"Sorry, Ginny," Thompson says. Even Warrington looks a little sheepish, but as usual doesn't bother to apologize for their less than stellar coordination.

Ginny sucks in a breath and tries to smile bracingly. "We'll do better next time." Particularly after she makes them run enough drills to give them nightmares about it.

There's some sort of commotion happening at the other end of the pitch. Ginny glances over with very little interest just in time for Draco's voice to echo perfectly across the distance. "Or perhaps you can remember what your mother's house stank like, Potter, and Weasley's pigsty reminds you of it-."

The words barely begin to register with Ginny when George and Harry launch themselves at Draco, fists flying.

Ginny automatically moves towards the fray—that smug, talent-less, ridiculous _arsehole_.

Before she can move a step, Thompson grabs her arm. "Don't."

"Excuse me?" Ginny snaps, tugging at her arm. If he thinks she's just going to pretend-.

His grip doesn't lessen. "Let it go."

She turns to him, her mouth dropping open with indignation.

"I'm not telling you to forget," he says. "Just let it go. For now."

McGonagall and Madam Hooch are already sweeping in at this point, and Ginny blows out a breath. She knows Thompson's right, damn him.

He still doesn't let go of her arm.

She gives him an arch look, and he smiles sheepishly. "Just trying to make sure you aren't going to curse me the second I let go."

Ginny huffs a reluctant laugh. "No. But by the time we're done running drills next week, you might wish I had."

"Oh, great," Warrington complains.

Thompson lets go of her, and against everything screaming in her head, Ginny quietly follows them off the field.

* * *

><p>Harry, George, and Fred banned.<p>

Part of Ginny knows they earned it, letting their tempers get the best of them. Draco is a wanker, but they were just _words_. If she was going to be pissed about something, it would be Crabbe's late bludger. That was stupid _and_ dangerous.

She mostly wants to yell at George and Harry for making it so damn easy for Draco.

"Did you like my song, Weasley?" Draco asks, blithely calling her out in front of the entire common room.

For a moment she feels it, her blood boiling up with anger. Everyone knows that song isn't just about Ron's Quidditch skills, but about her family, _her_ parents. With effort, she swallows the rage back down. Draco isn't going to score any more points off of this. Not with her.

Ginny shakes her head, looking calmly back at him. "Can't say I heard it. Must have been too busy watching you not catch the snitch yet again."

Draco's face flushes, a few people nearby snickering behind their hands.

She stands staring at him another moment, to see if he has anything to follow up with, if he'll be stupid enough to pull his wand. (Please, oh please, she secretly hopes. Just give her a reason.)

She isn't really surprised when he does nothing more than glare at her. Just a little disappointed.

Giving him one last contemptuous glance, Ginny spins on her heel, carrying on as if he'd never interrupted her. She sinks down in a chair, pulling her Charms text up close to her face.

"Well done."

Ginny looks up over the edge of her book to see Antonia in a nearby chair.

"I'm letting it go," Ginny says, remembering Thompson's advice. "For now."

Antonia nods like this makes perfect sense. "Plenty of time for other things later."

Ginny's eyes narrow. "Like what, revenge?"

"Not revenge," Antonia says, her smile patient and a little predatory. "Reciprocity."

Watching Antonia disappear back behind her book, Ginny isn't sure she understands the difference.

* * *

><p>It's only been a week since the disastrous match when the galleon in Ginny's pocket heats up, the numbers changing to reflect the time of the next DA meeting. She looks up from her essay to find Tobias and Smita sharing a dubious glance, hands on their pockets.<p>

The question of whether to go to this next meeting doesn't seem as easy as it did the week before.

Ginny's still able to see the difference between Draco and Crabbe being arseholes and concluding that all of Slytherin is evil. She's not so sure about the rest of DA though.

Still, she's not ready to concede her hard won ground. "I'm up for it," she says.

Tobias shrugs, looking over at Smita. "One way or another, it should be exciting."

Smita nods her agreement. "I say we go."

Ginny tries to tell if Harry looks surprised or annoyed by their presence at the meeting later than night, but he's surprisingly stone-faced for him. She bites down on the ridiculous urge to apologize. Other than being on the same team as those berks, she hadn't done anything.

Of course, to a Gryffindor, inaction is probably sin enough in itself.

She moves over to stand by Neville, and he seems happy enough to see her. He's not so clueless not to notice her discomfort, the occasional nasty look slid her way by some of the Gryffindor.

"You didn't do anything, Ginny," Neville says quietly as she squares off in front of a practice dummy.

"Maybe I should have," she says. "Maybe I should have punched Crabbe in the face."

Neville grimaces. "Then you could have had a lifetime ban as well."

"Would I?" she asks, taking aim at the dummy in front of her. "Or would I have just gotten lines?" She isn't stupid. She sees the way things work and don't work by house. She can see the benefits next to the limits.

Neville sighs. "You have to live with them, Ginny. Everyone knows that."

Ginny's hand tightens on her wand. "_Reducto_."

The dummy explodes.

* * *

><p>Things slowly thaw and simmer down as Christmas nears, everyone getting ready to go home. Ginny still occasionally catches snippets of that rude song in the common room, but has become expert at ignoring it. It's hard though, trying to look like they aren't getting to her when all she really wants to do is knock heads together.<p>

Instead, she learns to pretend she's a glacier; Antonia's approving looks the only gauge she has to tell how she's doing.

It takes more than a song to crack ice.

Even the animosity directed towards them at DA meetings slowly drops to barely noticeable levels, but that may just be everyone's excitement over the holidays. Or the shared amusement over an ornament with Harry's face on it that Padma found under one of the cushions. Ginny thought a nice engorgement charm and a willing volunteer to stick it in Harry's bed would be a worthy endeavor.

Smita and Tobias bemoan their general lack of access to the Gryffindor common room.

Around them, the room has emptied out, students disappearing in twos and threes.

"We should probably go," Smita says into her ear.

Ginny looks back over her shoulder to see Cho lingering by the bulletin board, Harry taking an inordinately long time to put away the cushions. Which, considering how much of his attention is riveted to Cho and not the chore, is understandable.

"Ah," Ginny mock whispers back.

They head for the door, Tobias unable to resist. "See you later, Harry!" he says brightly.

Harry jumps a little at the too loud farewell, his cheeks burning red as if being caught doing something wrong. He waves vaguely at them, more a desperate shooing motion.

Ginny looks back over her shoulder one last time as they leave to see Cho crying, Harry looking panicked.

She shakes her head with a snort. Boys.

* * *

><p>"Miss Weasley."<p>

Ginny wrenches open her eyes to find Professor Snape standing over her bed, face eerily lit by the tip of his wand. She's pretty sure she's had this nightmare before.

She rubs hard at her eyes to dispel the image.

Only his face still lingers. "I need you to get up and come with me," he says.

Ginny frowns. "Sir?"

"There's been an accident."

She sits up so quickly they nearly bump heads. "Who?" She has so many people to worry about, her brain flying through the list at dizzying speeds.

Snape doesn't seem to be in a cooperative mood, his face giving nothing away. "Come along."

Deciding obedience will get her answers the quickest, she does little more than slip on a robe and shove her feet into her slippers, her heart pounding away in her chest.

Smita pokes her head out between her drapes, her face creased with sleep and confusion. "Ginny?"

Snape's head whips around in her direction. "Go back to sleep, Miss Gupta. This does not concern you."

Smita frowns, but does as she's told after darting Ginny a glance that seems to demand an explanation at some later time.

Ginny follows Snape through the dark halls with nothing but the tip of his lit wand to guide them, and tries not to think how eerie the castle feels like this, full of shadows and hidden things. Still, it's easier than thinking about what waits for her at the end of this walk.

Their destination turns out to be the Headmaster's office and that just can't be good. Up in the circular, bizarre office that normally Ginny would have loved to have taken the time to poke about in, her brothers are all already there with Harry. Harry looks like someone has drained all the blood from his body and for a second she thinks he may be the one who was hurt. But then why would she need to be here?

"What's going on?" she asks, making a beeline for the twins.

They mutely shake their heads, watching Harry almost warily.

Fred shifts over to make room for her between them. "Something with Dad," he says under his breath as if he's trying not to draw Snape or Dumbledore's attention.

"What?" Ginny says, barely more than a gasp, her heart dropping into her stomach.

George drapes a tense arm over her shoulders. "Just wait," he says. "We don't know anything yet."

Across the room, Harry glances up at them and then just as quickly away again.

Dumbledore eventually smuggles them out to Grimmauld Place, but there's just more waiting and trying not to panic once they get there. Ginny thinks it must be one of the longest nights of her entire life, sitting there waiting, swallowing her words and fears until she feels like she may explode.

It's nearly dawn when Mum finally appears, looking a bit like death herself, but with a smile plastered on her wan face. "He's going to be fine."

Around her, everyone erupts into whoops of joy. Ginny lowers her head, wanting to weep, but the tears just won't come.

* * *

><p>What's left of the night passes in fits and starts, time seeming to drag and then speed up at unbearable rates.<p>

Ginny's dead on her feet, but still manages to help Mum get breakfast on the table. The tension hasn't really left them yet, and she knows it won't until they can see Dad for themselves. Luckily no one tries to make them wait any longer than it takes for the hospital to open for visitors.

Part of Ginny doesn't really let herself believe he's okay until she finally lays eyes on her dad. Then she really starts to breathe again, and instead of crying, now all she wants to do is laugh, the pressure of giddiness building against her ribs. He looks awful, body covered in bandages, face bloodless, and there is absolutely nothing to laugh about, not even the way Mum is playing out her relief by scolding him like a child. But still, the pressure won't leave. She doesn't even mind getting shunted out into the hallway when the conversation turns to Adult Things.

He's okay.

Besides, the twins came prepared as always, pulling out Extendible Ears for them all, their faces seeming to reflect the giddiness in Ginny's chest.

They gleefully listen in from the other side of the doors, all of their smiles goofy with lack of sleep and sheer relief. Most of what the adults in the other room are saying isn't even registering, until Moody's voice growls out above the rest.

"Obviously Potter doesn't realize what that means, but if You-Know-Who's possessing him-."

Harry pulls back from the door with a jerk.

Ginny remembers it all too clearly in that moment—the way Tom can shove his way back in when you least expect it.

* * *

><p>Ron is moping in the kitchen.<p>

He's been there all morning. Harry must still be freezing him out, Ginny assumes, the same way he ignored all of them yesterday on the ride back from hospital. He's been in his room since then. Hiding, pouting, who knows?

Mum's beginning to look pinched, probably disturbed that is has been almost 24 hours since she was last able to feed up Harry. The lunch tray she's prepared for him looks like enough for a small army.

Ginny's had just about enough of this. Her dad nearly died two days ago, and even if Harry is the one who seems to have saved his life, he doesn't have the right to add more worry to her mother's overloaded plate. Plus, Ron is driving her nuts.

"I'll take it up," she says before anyone can protest.

Balancing the tray of food in one hand, Ginny knocks on Harry's door. There's a long silence, and she's forced to knock again, louder and more persistently to let him know she isn't going away.

"I'm not hungry," he finally calls through the door.

Too bad, she thinks, opening the door. He looks surprised by her nerve, swinging up to a seated position on the bed. She sees him take a breath like he's trying to rein in his temper.

"Really. I'm not hungry," he repeats.

The trunk by the end of his bed is open, stuff haphazardly thrown into it like he was packing in a hurry and then changed his mind.

Putting the tray down, Ginny closes the door behind her.

"Ginny," he says, the word a warning.

She ignores it. "Ask me."

He pushes off the bed, the anger nearly radiating off of him now. "I want to be left alone."

She takes a stubborn step forward. "Ask me…" She breaks off, swallowing. "Ask me what it's like to have Voldemort take over your body."

Harry stills, and she knows in that moment that he's been lucky enough to forget, to forget _why_ he almost died in that chamber so many years ago.

She takes another step forward, her voice hardening. "_Ask me_."

All the anger and bluster seems to drain out of him, leaving him looking painfully uncertain. "What…what was it like?"

Ginny licks her lips, dragging back up the memories she has done everything to forget for so long. "It's like…everything is soft, cushioned, dulled. Like the effort it would take to actually feel an emotion is too much to even contemplate. Like you're fading so much that people only look through you until you start to think that disappearing forever would be the best thing that could happen to you. Best for everyone."

"Ginny," he says, his jaw clenching.

She swallows impatiently back against the tears she refuses to let fall. "There were long black periods that I still don't remember. Time I have no idea what I did, or who I hurt." She looks him in the eye. "Has that ever happened to you?"

"No."

She nods. "I didn't think so."

Harry sits back down on the bed like all of his strings have been cut, dragging a hand through his hair.

"You didn't hurt our father, Harry. We all know that. So stay up here and hide if that's what you want. But don't do it because you think you're protecting us." She turns to leave.

"I'm so angry," he says. "All of the time."

She pauses with her hand on the doorknob. It's been radiating off of him all year, the anger, but she hadn't known if that was just normal for him, if he is always like this, or if it was something new.

She peers back over her shoulder at him. "That's probably a good thing, don't you think?"

He frowns. "How do you figure?"

She shrugs, remembering those long days floating through the castle like a ghost. "You wouldn't be angry if you didn't care."

Tom never cared about anything or anyone. Only himself.

She opens the door.

"Ginny?"

She pauses. "Yeah?"

"Thanks."

She hoists a shaky smile on her face. "Yeah. Just let Ron back in, will you? He's driving us all spare."

He huffs, not quite a laugh, but on its way.

She leaves him picking at the tray of food, passing the newly arrived Hermione on the stairs.

"All yours," Ginny says.

* * *

><p>Christmas creeps into Grimmauld Place like an uninvited guest. Sirius attacks the holiday with a manic sort of energy that does nothing to make it feel right. It's a bit like sticking an icicle on Kreacher's forehead and calling him a unicorn.<p>

Still, Mum is trying her best for them all, and Ginny figures she owes it to Dad to at least try. So when George and Fred decide to trim a tree, she pitches in by suggesting transmogrifying Kreacher's predecessors into shiny baubles. She really mourns that ornament with Harry's face that must still be sitting in the room of requirement.

She even overhears Harry say to Hermione, "Still better than Christmas with the Dursleys."

Unfortunately, Grimmauld place is still Grimmauld place, even under all the tinsel.

Dad isn't home yet either, so Christmas breakfast is a bit subdued even with everyone's new brightly colored sweaters. There's one more unopened package sitting under the end of the table that Ginny pretends not to know is meant for Percy. To judge from the set lock of Mum's jaw, he'd had the unmitigated gall to send it back. She wonders if he even cares that Dad is in hospital. That he'd almost died.

But thinking of Percy only makes Ginny want to use her Reductor curse on something, and Mum doesn't deserve that on top of everything else today. So instead she tucks in and does her best to let Sirius's obvious glee at having them all here not feel weird.

Soon enough it's time to go back to school, still not knowing why or how Dad ended up nearly dead by giant snake attack.

Ginny thinks it will be relief to have her wand back in her hand.

* * *

><p>Hogwarts in the snow is widely accepted as one of the most beautiful sights in the world.<p>

Ginny couldn't be less moved.

"Merlin's beard, did you dimwits forget _everything_ over Christmas? It's like a drunken band of Muggles out here." She hears the other two chasers' feet hit the ground slightly after her, but doesn't bother turning to look at their reaction to her diatribe.

She considers throwing her broom down in disgust, but isn't willing to let her emotions out on her equipment. It would be far more practical to take them out on Thompson and Warrington's stupid heads. Gripping her broom tightly, she stomps off the field.

She hasn't made it far when a wet, soft ball of snow hits her on the back of the head, the slush working its way into her collar.

She spins to find Warrington unapologetically brushing snow off his hands. Her mouth drops open, turning to the nearby Bletchley.

He just shrugs and says, "You pretty much deserved that, Six."

Next to Warrington, Thompson nods in agreement.

So maybe she was a little harsh. Worked up, even. She just really wants to win their next match. Don't they get that?

Warrington raises an eyebrow at her, probably waiting to see if she's going to pull her wand.

She lets out a breath, forcing her shoulders to relax. She waits just long enough for Warrington to relax too. Then she says in a mild voice, "You understand, of course, that this means war."

Warrington's eyes widen, and Ginny ducks to scoop up a handful of snow. She launches it towards him, but he dodges out of the way at the last moment, and the snowball catches Thompson square in the face.

Ginny lifts her hands to her mouth in horror.

Thompson flicks the snow out of his eyes and shrugs. "All in." Then he dumps two handfuls of snow down on Warrington's head.

Ginny chokes on a laugh, looking back over her shoulder at Bletchley.

He lifts a hand, backing away. "Don't you dare-."

He doesn't get to finish, Ginny's next snowball exploding on his chest.

After that, all bets are off. The four of them scramble for cover, wands appearing and snowballs beginning to sneak up behind people at strange angles. Through her laughter, Ginny reflects that this is actually pretty good practice for evading bludgers. Bletchley, she knows, would never admit they were doing this for any other reason.

She sees Crabbe and Goyle snickering together near the stands, but doesn't think anything of it. Thompson is making a valiant attempt at flanking her, so she's got more pressing things on her mind than Crabbe and Goyle's snide remarks about their childish behavior.

Then she gets hit from behind by something much faster and harder than a mere snowball could possibly be. She goes down like a sack of potatoes. Despite the press of snow around her, the slush working in through her robes, her arm is on fire and she knows something is seriously wrong.

"Oh, suck it up, Six," Bletchley calls out, peering up over the rise as if expecting a trap.

Ginny doesn't reply, her jaw clenched tight against the moan of agony she refuses to let out.

"Gin?" Thompson says, dropping his snowball as he approaches. Warrington takes the opportunity to dust him again, but Thompson just brushes it off. She must look as bad as she feels.

"Bletchley," Thompson says, picking up what looks like a solid ball of ice nearly the size of a bludger.

"Son of a-," Bletchley swears, looking up from Ginny to find Crabbe and Goyle laughing uproariously over by the stands. "Stupid sods." He disappears from Ginny's vision, no doubt off to give the idiots a piece of his mind for endangering their win against Ravenclaw.

"Shoulder?" Thompson asks, kneeling down next to her.

Ginny nods, biting down on her tongue.

"Let's get her inside," Warrington says.

Thompson slides an arm under her knees and one behind her back. Ginny hisses in pain, letting out a curse. "I can walk," she snaps.

Bletchley reappears. "Shut up and let him carry you."

The way up to the castle takes forever, and she's nearly frozen through by the time they get there.

"Bludger accident," Bletchley succinctly lies to Pomfrey in the infirmary.

Ginny doesn't bother contradicting him. They can't get Crabbe and Goyle in trouble. They need the stupid morons for their game.

Pomfrey mutters a few words over Ginny, her fingers unerringly digging in right on the tender bits. "Collarbone is broken."

"You can fix that, right?" Bletchley presses. Ginny would feel warmed by that if she didn't know his concern is for the match.

Pomfrey gives him a stern look. "The bone, yes. But the tissue damage will take longer to heal."

"How long?"

She presses her lips together. "Four weeks to heal completely."

Four _weeks_? Their game against Ravenclaw is in less than one.

Bletchely swears, Madam Pomfrey giving him a scandalized look.

"I can play," Ginny says. It's only her left arm, thank goodness. She only needs that to stay on her broom, not score.

"No you can't," Madam Pomfrey contradicts.

"There's almost a week until the match. I'll wear a sling, I won't use it at all, I'll stay lying here the entire time if you want, drinking any potion you can think of. I just have to play. Please."

The rest of the team is nodding along.

"Please," Ginny repeats, giving Madam Pomfrey her most pathetic look.

Pomfrey's lips press together. "One week of total and complete rest. And then I will check you again. If there is any lingering pain, I won't allow you to play."

It's not perfect, but she'll take it. "Deal."

* * *

><p>DA meetings are decidedly less interesting when all you can do is sit and watch. Still, Ginny is good to her word, sitting off to one side with her arm in a sling.<p>

She'd gotten more than a few curious glances when she arrived, people clearly interested in how she'd been injured. She hasn't changed her story, just says, "Bludger accident," anytime anyone asks.

Most of them take that at face value, even with Tobias rolling his eyes with disbelief each time. (Ginny hadn't even bothered telling Tobias and Smita anything; just let them draw their own conclusions.) Fred and George frown at her story, but don't push.

Ginny is even more annoyed with her injury when she realizes that Harry is finally going to introduce the patronus charm. Sitting up a bit taller, she watches in awe as the silvery stag leaps to life, its bright light filling the room. It's not just light either, but something tangible, something that seems to make everything buoyant, warmer. When it fades, disappearing into wisps, Ginny has the foolish thought that everything is slightly less cheerful in its wake, the dull ache in her arm intensifying. Nearby, she hears one of the Ravenclaw girls sigh as if with disappointment.

Harry lowers his wand. "With practice, a patronus can serve as a barrier between you and a Dementor."

"It's so beautiful," Lavender sighs.

Harry coughs, looking embarrassed by the girl's breathy enthusiasm. "I'm not going to lie to you. They're wicked hard to produce, but are the only thing that can save you from a Dementor."

"It's pretty," Angelina admits. "But how does that protect you?"

"It's made from happy thoughts," Harry explains. "The same things that Dementors seek to drain away from you, but the patronus can't feel despair. Ultimately, that much pure happiness and goodness simply drives the Dementor away."

There's a smatter of whispers at that, many remembering what it had felt like to be near one that one year on the train.

Smita raises her hand. "What determines the shape a patronus takes?"

Harry frowns. "I'm actually not sure." He automatically turns to Hermione.

She doesn't disappoint. "Some theorize that it reflects the caster's personality, or something tied to the happy memory used to produce it, but no one knows for certain."

Smita nods, sharing a look with Tobias that Ginny can't quite interpret.

Someone behind them mutters something about Slytherin not having any happy memories to pick from.

Tobias shoots a menacing glance back over his shoulder. Fingering his wand, he says, "I know how I could _make_ some happy memories."

People laugh, a few more nervous than amused, but Ginny thinks not even that would have happened before the DA.

"Okay," Harry says. "Let's give it a try."

* * *

><p>At the end of the week, Ginny is able to sit perfectly calm through Pomfrey's examination, betraying not so much as a grimace no matter how times she pokes her. Of course, that's really only thanks to a nice potion Smita brewed for her. It isn't really cheating, exactly. Not when the situation is so dire.<p>

Pomfrey still looks suspicious, giving Ginny one last hard, unexpected poke. Ginny flexes her stomach, managing to hold in a groan at the pain in her arm. She breathes carefully and lets her face soften into a smile. "See? Right as rain."

Pomfrey sniffs. "All right. But if there is permanent damage because of this, don't come back crying to me."

Ginny feels a twinge of worry with that, but quickly shoves it aside, focusing instead on the match. Her team doesn't stand a chance without her and they all know it.

Saturday dawns hard and cold, with heavy grey clouds glowering above. Not exactly promising, but Ginny doesn't need sunshine, just another hit of Smita's amazing potion.

As they get ready to head out onto the pitch, Bletchley grabs Draco's shoulder. "Catch the damn snitch," he growls. "And sooner rather than later."

Draco scowls, shaking off Bletchley's hand. Crabbe and Goyle follow him out, still looking faintly amused by the situation. Too stupid to understand the impact of what they've done.

Bletchly sighs, but doesn't bother pressing further. He must know a losing battle when he sees one. He doesn't bother to ask Ginny if she is okay, and she wouldn't expect him to. One thing they have always implicitly agreed on is how much Quidditch matters.

He does reach out to punch her in his normal pre-game ritual, ending up changing last moment and patting her awkwardly on her head.

Ginny rolls her eyes and calls him something profane.

Bletchly grins, knuckles digging into her scalp.

She shoves him off, shoulders her broom, and walks out onto the pitch.

As the two teams line up on the field, there's no visible sign of recognition when Ginny stands across from Cho, no sign that they are both in the DA together. Not surprising.

The match starts off okay, the pain manageable, but as the match stretches on and on and no one finds the snitch and the cold starts seeping in, it takes everything Ginny has just to stay on her broom.

After a half hour in, Bletchley calls a timeout, and Ginny has to wonder if she's begun to look green from the pain. He doesn't speak to her though, instead yelling at Draco to get the damn snitch and for the beaters to do their bloody jobs.

Smita slips into the clutch of players with a steaming goblet in her hand, blithely ignoring the yelling.

"For the record," she says, handing the goblet over, "this is a really bad idea."

Probably, but Ginny still downs the contents of the goblet, feeling a flush of instant relief.

Ginny does her best to run up as many points as possible while the potion is still strong, and Warrington and Thompson step up their game accordingly. Luckily the Ravenclaw keeper is not very good, even if Cho is still flying circles around Draco. Draco seems incapable of doing anything more than getting in Cho's way from time to time, relying on his thuggish friends to fire bludgers in her direction.

Still, it does afford the chasers time enough to build a lead. Just enough to ensure that even if Cho gets the snitch, they can still win.

A late, stupid, stupid, _stupid_ foul nearly destroys their precious lead. Crabbe, of course.

Ginny manages to fling one last quaffle home right before Cho grabs the snitch.

Victory.

Stepping off her broom in the midst of her cheering teammates, Ginny almost collapses to the ground. Thompson steps up as if to slap her on the back, his arm sliding carefully around her back. "You, Weasley, are one of the craziest, stubbornest, most foolhardy people I know," he says, helping her get back to the locker room. "It's kind of amazing."

If she wasn't in so much pain, she might punch him for that.

"I just hope it's worth it," he says.

So does she.

* * *

><p>The next morning, Ginny feels pretty close to death, the price, she knows, for the temporary reprieve Smita's potions provided. As much as she wants more potion, she thinks food might be order. Food and then more bed. For like a week.<p>

After breakfast she sits in the common room with Tobias and Smita. Her head is pounding away, she's overwhelmingly behind on her homework, and the last damn straw is Crabbe sitting in the common room, flicking little paper wads at Millicent. Her shoulder, the song, the late bludger, the look on Millicent's face as she pretends it doesn't bother her…it's all just too damn much.

Unbidden, Neville's voice rises up in her head.

_You have to live with them, Ginny. Everyone knows that. _

No, Ginny thinks. Neville got it wrong.

They have to live with her.

"What are you thinking about when you look like that?" Smita asks, voice wary.

Ginny's eyes narrow. Shoving her books aside, she gets to her feet, marching across the common room. She passes Crabbe without pause, caching a snippet of the barely coherent, nasty things he's not bothering to whisper about Millicent.

"Antonia," Ginny says when she nears the older girl's chair. "I was wondering if you could help me with something."

Antonia takes one look at Ginny's face, a lazy smile spreading across her face like a cat presented with a bowl of cream. "I thought you'd never ask."

* * *

><p>Just to be extra careful, Ginny decides to belatedly take Pomfrey's advice, keeping her arm in the sling for another two weeks. She doesn't use it at all, too worried about what Pomfrey had said about permanent damage now that the match is over. Not that she regrets it. Quidditch is a serious business. Which is exactly why now that she has the time, she is going to get her recovery done right.<p>

The lack of Quidditch practices even allows her to finally get caught up in her studies again.

At the DA meetings, they have finally begun trying to produce their own patronuses, with minimal success so far. Mostly they manage nothing more than shooting short bursts of glittery mist at each other. But even the mist has the effect of endless smiles and giggles. Even sitting on the sidelines, Ginny's arm hurts far less.

The whole group is in high spirits, swapping insults and tall tales. Fred is relating their latest prank on Filch, Lee Jordan doing a credible impersonation of the caretaker clutching his blue dyed tongue.

"I hear Crabbe is in the infirmary," George cackles, not bothering to hide his malicious pleasure.

"Stupid git fell down the stairs," Tobias supplies, ever happy to jump in with well-timed gossip. "Too thick to remember the sticking step, poor sod."

They all laugh.

Ginny looks up to find Harry watching her from across the room.

She meets his gaze unblinkingly.

He calls an end to the meeting, the wisps of light dissipating.

The room feels a little darker than when they began.

* * *

><p>In February, the newly cobbled together Gryffindor Quidditch team loses bad to Hufflepuff.<p>

From the stands, Ginny winces, and tries to remind herself that Gryffindor losing to Hufflepuff is a good thing for Slytherin's chances. Still, it's painful to watch.

The only good thing is that no one dares to sing Malfoy's stupid song anywhere near her. She doubts anyone will ever again.

She glances over at Malfoy and Goyle, looking a little lonely just the two of them.

Biting her lip, she turns back to watching the game.

Off the pitch, things have begun to ramp up. Starting with Harry's interview for the Quibbler and Umbridge's more and more over the top attempts to control the school, sacking teachers and belittling them and trying to make it look like she rules the school and not Dumbledore.

It would almost be impressive if it weren't so damn annoying.

Smita rushes up to Ginny one evening after dinner, her face pale.

"Smita?" Ginny asks, glancing across the room at Tobias. "What's wrong?"

"Umbridge is purging the library of all non-wizard materials."

This is probably the last thing she expected Smita to say. "What?"

She nods as Tobias joins them. "Everything by Muggles, or Goblins, or Centuars. She has Pince boxing them all up."

Ginny really wants to say, _she can't do that_, but knows very well that she can. This must be about Firenze and Trewlawny. About Umbridge feeling the need to reassert her power again in the face of Harry's interview and all the things she can't control.

"Madam Pince was actually…_crying_," Smita says, looking seriously disturbed. She looks up at Ginny. "We're going to do something, right?"

"Of course we are," Tobias says, disgust clear in his voice. If there is one thing he won't tolerate, it's someone trying to separate him from books. "Nicking them should be easy enough. Pince would probably help us. We just need somewhere safe to keep them."

"Room of Requirement?" Smita asks.

"No," Ginny says, glancing towards the non-descript door that doesn't lead to a broom closet. "I think I might know somewhere even better."

She walks over to the door, Smita and Tobias trailing behind her. She isn't sure whether she should try the door handle, knock, or what.

It should surprise her, the way Antonia materializes, languidly strolling around the corner, but Ginny has long since stopped wondering the limits of the girl's powers.

Ginny walks up to her, Tobias and Smita hanging back. "If we were to…liberate some books, could you help us find someplace to keep them?"

"I could," she says, paying more attention to a hand of perfect fingernails than Ginny's proposition. "But why should I?"

Ginny is taken a little aback, not expecting obstructionism from Antonia. She wonders if she's been getting a little too comfortable with thinking she actually knows the older girl.

"Because Umbridge is going to destroy them," Smita blurts from behind her. Ginny glances back to see Smita looking stunned at her own daring.

Next to her, Tobias nods, taking a bold step forward. "Plus, they're forbidden. Education Decree number bazillion should be telling us so any minute now. Don't know about you three, but it makes me really want to read them." He winks at Antonia, but she remains stone-faced and silent. As the moments pass, for possibly the first time Ginny's ever seen, Tobias seems discomforted, dropping his eyes to his toes and shifting his weight.

"Because no one has the right to tell us what we can't read," Ginny says, finally recognizing this for the test it is.

Antonia is silent for another long moment, her gaze finally shifting to Ginny. "No," she agrees. "No one has that right."

Ginny holds her gaze.

Antonia finally nods. "Bring them to me, and I'll take care of the rest," she says, disappearing down into The Parlor.

"Merlin," Tobias breathes as soon as Antonia is out of sight. "I think a basilisk could probably take lessons from her."

Probably. But that's a worry for another day.

"Come on," Ginny says. "We have plans to make."

* * *

><p>The disappearance of dozens of forbidden books from the library remains a secret only known to Umbridge, Pince, and the perpetrators. But secret or not, Umbridge continues to ratchet up her attempts to control every aspect of the castle the more things slip through her fingers. She sets up an Inquisitorial Squad. A group of students given the power to patrol and generally snitch on their peers. It's probably unsurprising that most of the members are Slytherin boys, with a few Ravenclaw sprinkled in here and there.<p>

If Percy were still here, Ginny has no doubt he would have been the first to sign up, Gryffindor or not.

They still have the DA though. Just another secret reminder that Umbridge doesn't control things as much as she thinks she does. For many of them that knowledge is like a nice warm little patronus in their pocket.

The Room of Requirement is full of them these days, bright glittering animals of various shapes and sizes.

At the time, Ginny hadn't really been sure what Smita was getting at, wanting to know what determines the shape a patronus takes. Now, watching the other students laugh and stare at their patronuses in awe, she wonders how none of them can see it, see how much they are revealing of themselves.

Smita, Tobias, and Ginny share glances, their patronuses remaining nothing but spits of mist. Better to look incompetent than to give away so much information for nothing.

Harry works his way over to Ginny's side. "What's going on?" he asks, voice lowered so it doesn't carry.

She glances up at him. "What do you mean?"

He gives her a look as if to remind her he's not an idiot. "I've seen your Reductor curse," he reminds her.

She smirks a little, remembering the sheer destructive energy that spell had unleashed.

"You aren't trying," he accuses, lifting her wand arm slightly like he's adjusting her technique.

She isn't sure how to play this, go with fake indignation or maybe just feign ignorance. Could she still blame her shoulder injury somehow?

"The truth," Harry presses, like he can see the lies she's considering.

"No," she admits. "I'm not trying." She glances at Ron's terrier trotting past. "Are you really surprised?"

He frowns, but before he has time to work it out, a loud crack nearby distracts him. Ginny expects to find Seamus has blown something up, but instead a small house elf stands next to Harry, his hands wringing anxiously in front of him.

"Dobby?"

It takes precious moments to get the news out of the elf as he tries to simultaneously punish himself and speak, but the words are finally free.

"Umbridge is coming!"

There's horrified silence, the patronuses blinking out of existence, and it isn't until Harry bellows at them to scatter that it really sinks in.

Tobias grabs for Ginny's arm, already heading for the exit when Smita breaks away, heading further back into the room.

"Smita!" Ginny snaps. "We have to go!"

Smita sprints for the bulletin board against the wall, her wand jabbing in the direction of the piece of parchment hanging in with all the clippings and photos. Ginny has just long enough to see the names on the list bleed and morph incomprehensibly underneath the blatant lettering of DUMBLEDORE'S ARMY.

"Let's go!" Ginny shouts, dragging Smita out into the hall.

They are easily the last students out into the hall, complete sitting ducks for Umbridge and her enforcers.

Tobias gestures up the first staircase they reach. "Owlery," he says.

They've only made it halfway up the distance when they hear feet pounding behind them.

Tobias' hand on Ginny's elbow lurches her to a stop. "No time," he hisses, shoving them both against the wall just in time for two of the student goons to round the corner. They're Slytherin, a year younger than themselves.

"Oi," the taller goon says. "You lot seen any students running around out here?"

Tobias looks up as if bored. "No," he says, his hand tightening on Ginny's waist. "But I haven't exactly been paying attention either now, have I?"

The boys glance at Smita and Ginny, their hair still askew from their run, and guffaw loudly.

Tobias smiles, slow and lecherous. The two goons are still laughing as they turn back in the other direction.

Once they are out of earshot, Ginny punches Tobias in the arm.

He yelps, rubbing at the spot. "Ow! What was that for?"

"Brilliant," Ginny says, shaking her head. "But disgusting."

Tobias grins.

A triumphant bellow echoes down the hall. "I've got him, Professor! I've got Potter!"

It only takes a moment to identify the voice as Draco's. Ginny moves as if to push off the wall, Smita's hand stopping her.

"There's nothing we can do."

Ginny stops, knowing Harry wouldn't want them to even if they could.

The walk back to the dorms is quiet with expectation. Tomorrow everything will be different.

* * *

><p>The next morning the Great Hall is buzzing with Dumbledore's abrupt departure, with Umbridge's elevation to Headmaster. Things seem to have gone from bad to worse. And all because of their little rebellion.<p>

All the DA members are eying each other, their suspicious regard lingering more on Tobias and Smita than anyone else. Someone must have betrayed them.

Ginny waits for the stupid gits to finally realize that there is only one DA member missing from the hall, and she's not a Slytherin. Cho looks slightly embarrassed by the obviously empty seat next to her, the one her friend and reluctant DA member Marietta normally would have occupied.

It's not until the next day that she reappears with thick red bumps blazed across her face. "SNEAK." It's awful and perfect and Ginny can't honestly say how she feels about it other than righteously absolved of everyone's biased suspicions about the Slytherin.

Smita gazes as Marietta as she passes, a puzzle piece seemingly to finally fall into place. "So that's the curse Hermione used. Impressive."

Tobias snorts with derision, probably more pissed that he almost got caught than the fact that the DA was betrayed. "Got what she deserved if you ask me."

Ginny glances down the table, her eye caught by Millicent sitting on her own. "Yeah," she agrees distractedly.

Ginny meets Harry's grim stare across the hall. He eyes Smita and Tobias next to her and nods. She thinks this is all the acknowledgement she will probably ever get. It's enough.

* * *

><p>If Umbridge thought destroying the DA and Dumbledore in one swoop would solve anything, she didn't bank on two things: Fred and George Weasley. There is hardly any part of the castle that doesn't feel the effects of their reign of terror. It's blatant and over the top and stupidly brave, and Ginny knows her brothers are loving absolutely every moment of it.<p>

It's not long until Ginny's galleon heats up in her pocket again, only this time not for a DA meeting, but rather for a coordinated prank.

Fred, George, Ron, Harry, Neville, Luna, and a mulish looking Hermione are all already gathered in the empty Charms room when Ginny shows up, Tobias and Smita in tow. "What's going on?"

Fred nods in welcome, face grave as it only is when serious mischief is afoot. "We need to get Harry into Umbridge's office."

They all glance at Harry, and Ginny notices for the first time that he looks a little grim. This is more than a lark, she can't help but think.

Tobias looks surprised. "Ballsy," he comments. "Sounds like fun."

Ginny smiles, glancing at Smita and getting a small nod. "I guess we're in."

Fred and George lay out their plan to turn an upper level into a swamp. By the time they are finished, Tobias is less enthused.

"What?" Ron asks, voice tinged with animosity.

Tobias ignores it. "Seems a bit of a dodgy plan."

Hermione perks up, nodding along as if finally glad to have someone agreeing with her. "Better not to do it."

Ron glares at her before turning his annoyance back to Tobias. "What, too scared to get caught?"

If he expected Tobias to take that as an insult, he clearly has no idea who he is talking to. Caution isn't stupid, opening yourself up to pointless punishment is.

"Ron, don't be a prat," Ginny says. "He's just saying that if we are going to do this, we should do it right."

Smita nods. "There's no need to rush ahead and get caught."

Fred and George look like they are speaking a different language.

"The swamp is a good start," Ginny says, walking around the table. "We just need a few other obstacles to make sure no one walks in on Harry in her office, or the twins laying their trap." She taps the map in a few key spots. "Keep Peeves distracted, professors out of the corridors, that sort of thing."

The Gryffindor have gone silent, Luna's soft humming the only other sound in the room.

"What you really need is someone with a bit more cunning," Tobias points out.

"And subtlety," Smita adds, glancing at the bright jumpers worn by her brothers.

Ginny bites back a smile.

Ron is still staring at them with his mouth hanging open, but Fred is looking at them with narrow, assessing eyes. "You volunteering?"

Tobias drops a courtly bow. "Why don't you just let us do what we do best."

George peers at him. "Be a sneaky git?"

Ginny crosses her arms over her chest. "Exactly."

They all know the only reason they didn't all end up in detention after the DA was busted was because Smita kept her head.

The plan comes together easily enough after that, though she can tell it's not quite as by the seat of their pants as the Gryffindors might have preferred. But why get caught or be punished if you don't have to?

They have all agreed on the timing and are splitting off their separate ways when Fred drops an arm over Ginny's shoulders, holding her back. "You always were the sneakiest of us all, weren't you?" he says in her ear.

"Finally catching on, are you?" she asks like her heart isn't pounding away in her chest. She wraps an arm around her brother's waist and squeezes as hard as she can.

He laughs, dropping his chin to rest on the top of her head. "My hero," he says.

Ginny isn't sure if she wants to laugh or cry.

Of course, things don't quite go to plan (they never do when Gryffindors are involved). Harry manages to get in and out of the office unobserved, but Fred and George get themselves caught. She can't quite be sure that wasn't their intention all along. Bloody brave fools.

Either way, she isn't sure she's ever been more proud to be a Weasley than the day she watches her brothers streak out of Hogwarts on their brooms, the crackle of fireworks exploding in their wake.

Tobias bumps her arm, awe on his face. "Now _that_ is an exit."

Ginny smiles.

* * *

><p>One would think that with the departure of Fred and George, troublemakers extraordinaire, things might quiet down in the castle. But Peeves and the remaining members of the DA instead seem to be working very hard to fill the gap left behind. Helped a great deal by the fact that the professors are doing their best to constantly look the other way. They seem to have had their fill of Umbridge's reign as well.<p>

Still, the constant bang of explosions and stink of foul potions and pranks can wear on a person after a while. Ginny starts making a habit of spending every Saturday morning in the blessed quiet of her hidden cloister. This morning though, it's not quite as empty as it usually is. Harry is sitting in her favorite spot, staring down at a piece of parchment in his lap.

He looks up at her.

"Oh," Ginny says, deciding Harry must have wanted to find some of his own solitude. "I'm sorry." She starts to back-pedal, but Harry stops her.

"No, it's okay." He gestures at the parchment in his lap. "I saw you coming."

She frowns. "You did?"

He waves her over, holding the parchment out for her to see. It takes a moment for her to make sense of it, the intricate lines, the small moving dots.

"It's Hogwarts."

He nods.

She locates the cloister, seeing two little dots called Ginny Weasley and Harry Potter. At least that explains how he found the cloister in the first place.

"No wonder you get away with as much as you do," she says.

Harry huffs with amusement that doesn't really seem to reach his eyes.

She glances sideways at him. She doesn't want to press, but there's something almost…expectant about him right now. "Harry?"

He flips to the map over to the library, sitting there for a moment watching students studying. "I saw something I wasn't supposed to," he admits.

"You did?" Ginny asks, pulling her eyes away from the Patil twins' dots hovering in a strange part of the library stacks.

He nods. "It's why I wanted to get into Umbridge's office. To talk to Sirius."

Clearly talking to Sirius didn't fix anything though, to judge from how miserable he looks. It reminds her a bit of the last time they talked alone, that dark morning in Grimmauld place.

Harry rubs at the back of his neck. "I saw one of Snape's memories from school. Back when Sirius and my parents were here."

She doesn't ask him how he accidentally saw something like that. He looks sheepish enough for her to suspect curiosity played a large part in it.

"My father bullied him," he says in a rush, like the words are painful to get out. "They all did. For a lark."

"Snape?" Ginny asks, feeling something tight building in her stomach.

Harry nods.

She thinks of Snape and Sirius sniping at each other in the hallway at Grimmauld place, Antonia's voice in her ear.

_Things aren't always what they seem._

"I know what you're going to say," Harry says, voice bitter. "That they were just kids."

Ginny frowns. "So are we."

He's clearly surprised by her response, turning to look at her straight on, eyebrows lifting. "Exactly. If he knew what that was like…"

"Did he?" People have always talked about James Potter like a golden boy, and she doesn't know if that is all respect for the dead or something grounded in history.

Harry considers that, his lower lip caught between his teeth. "No, I don't think he did."

Harry doesn't talk much about how he grew up, certainly not to her. She just knows bits and pieces from Ron and Hermione, things her parents have said about the Dursleys in passing. James Potter never could have comprehended that. There was a time Ginny wouldn't have been able to either.

And maybe that, more than anything, was Antonia's point.

"I just…never thought I'd feel sorry for Snape." He glances quickly at her, like he's belatedly realized she might feel protective of her head of house.

"Yeah," she says. "Me neither." She thinks of Snape, cool and pointed, his eyes full of hatred as he picks on Gryffindors. It's enough to make her wonder where viciousness really comes from, but she thinks she may already know. "Everything always looks different from the other side."

"Yeah," Harry says. "I guess it does."

He's still staring at her with something like reluctant regard, and it isn't embarrassing as much as feeling that she doesn't deserve it.

_Reciprocity. _

Ginny glances away, her eye caught by the parchment still open on Harry's lap. "So this map…," she says, thinking fast.

"Yeah?"

"It could probably confirm something for me that I've been wondering about for a while."

Harry's brow furrows at the change in topic. "Possibly."

She flips the folds of the map until she can see the grounds, her finger tapping on a row of buildings. "I've heard Flitwick spends far more time in the greenhouses than is proper," she says, waggling her eyebrows in an impersonation of Tobias at his most suggestive.

Harry lets out a startled laugh. "I hadn't noticed," he says. He leans in closer as if imparting a great secret, his shoulder bumping up against hers. "But I can tell you that Madam Pince does on occasion actually sleep in the library."

"I knew it!" Ginny says.

They laugh, chatting a bit more about various people on the map, eventually settling into silence, spending the rest of the morning catching up on their homework.

It doesn't occur to her until much later that with that map, Harry could have easily known her Saturday morning schedule. That he might have expected her.

Just another mystery of Harry Potter, she decides.

* * *

><p>The thawing snows and clearing skies gradually reveal the grounds of Hogwarts again. Her arm finally completely healed and once again as strong as it was before her injury, Ginny throws herself back into practice. They have one last match left this year. It's just against Hufflepuff, but a big enough win would almost guarantee the Quidditch Cup for Slytherin. Even Snape seems excited by the possibility (as much as he seems excited by anything). The week leading up to the match, he lets the entire Slytherin team off their homework.<p>

Ginny's gaze lingers on him as the students work on the day's potion. Despite all of the revelations about Snape she'd learned from Harry, it's comforting to see that he's still predictable. Still, when Ginny meets Snape's gaze over the potions table one day, she finds herself looking just a little closer, surprised to find the animosity she's built up against him soften a little.

"Is there a problem, Miss Weasley?" he asks, voice as hard as his gaze.

"No, sir," she says, turning her attention back to her cauldron.

He paces back across the classroom, sniping at Colin for the abysmal color of his potion. "Completely hopeless," he declares, siphoning the potion out of the cauldron. "Start again. And try not to blow us all up with your incompetence."

Soon enough it is Saturday, the Quidditch pitch glorious in the warm spring sunshine.

Waiting for the balls to be released, Ginny glances around at her teammates, checking their positions. She catches Crabbe watching her, his expression unreadable. He's the first to look away. She doesn't feel as satisfied by that as she thinks she should. Still, at least she knows there won't be any late or stray bludgers this game.

That should mean something. Shouldn't it?

She's scared that it doesn't.

The whistle blows, and they are all off.

After the tense match against Gryffindor and the sheer agony of the Ravenclaw match, Ginny almost feels like she has too much time to think against Hufflepuff. Her game is seriously off, but they still win handily.

Hufflepuff's new seeker has big shoes to fill, after all. Draco manages to do the seemingly impossible and actually catch the snitch.

Just like that, they've won. Gryffindor would have to beat Ravenclaw by near 800 points. Considering what a tough time of it the Slytherin team had with Ravenclaw, the gutted Gryffindor doesn't stand a chance.

Glancing up at the professor's box, Ginny catches sight of Snape speaking with McGonagall, almost looking smug as if he's just asked for her to get ready to hand over the cup.

McGonagall, for her part, looks rather pinched around the face.

Thompson slams into Ginny then, hugging her tight, and she tries to forget anything other than the win.

* * *

><p>Ginny is moping.<p>

There really isn't any other word for it as much as she would like there to be. She's sitting in the common room, listening to the waters above, the occasional distant groan of a merperson's horn resonating in the walls. She isn't thinking how familiar is has all become, how comforting, but rather concentrates on the heavy feeling in her stomach that she just hasn't been able to shake.

She tries to tell herself this is about the Quidditch season being over, about the DA being disbanded, Fred and George being gone, but deep down she knows this is about something else entirely.

Coming into the Common Room the day before, Ginny had reached the doorway the same time as a first year boy. He'd quickly stepped out of her way, but not before she'd seen it there on her face: fear.

That look has settled deep into her stomach and refuses to leave.

Her thoughts keep spiraling back to Snape and feeling sorry for him and hating herself for it all at the same time.

Antonia had tried to warn her when she'd gone to her for help with Crabbe, with her reciprocity. Antonia had tried to warn her that there was a cost.

There is always a cost.

You just have to be willing to pay it.

Ginny had been too angry to really listen. Too filled with self-righteousness. But here she sits, paying the price all the same.

"I'm going to do a reading," Antonia says, her voice almost gentle as she appears over her shoulder. "Want to come?"

Ginny looks up at her and remembers the way she completely blew her first chance in The Parlor, and has to acknowledge how much that actually bothers her. Down in that mysterious room is a collection of girls not willing to be dictated to, to be told what they are capable of. Ginny knows she has a lot to learn from them.

And here Antonia is, giving her one more chance.

It occurs to Ginny that Antonia is one of the few people in her life willing to let her make own mistakes. Willing to let her figure out how to fix them, and not hold them against her.

"Yeah," Ginny says, still feeling that weight, but refusing it let it hold her down forever. "I would really like that."

* * *

><p>The rest of the year seems to pass in a blur. The seventh and fifth years disappear under massive piles of homework and revision for OWLs and NEWTs. She suspects Fred and George really let themselves get caught just so they wouldn't have to bother taking them.<p>

She misses the DA, but she's still meeting with Smita and Tobias sometimes, sharing spells and tricks Harry hadn't covered, ones she thinks he probably wouldn't approve of. Passing on things she's learned from Antonia.

And in the mornings now as she leaves for class, she passes by Millicent like she does every day, but now takes a moment to pause.

"Hi, Millicent," Ginny says.

She looks up, brow furrowed and eyes wary. "What?" she practically snarls.

Ginny smiles and keeps walking.

Tomorrow she'll try again.

* * *

><p>In June, Gryffindor faces off with Ravenclaw, and maybe because they have nothing to lose, Ron doesn't do half bad. She suspects he just needs a little confidence in himself. (And a much better team to play with. Ginny doesn't like to be uncharitable to other players, but the replacement Gryffindor Seeker and Beaters are really, really terrible. Yet another reason it is probably a blessing Fred and George aren't here anymore.)<p>

Still, eking out a win isn't enough to take the lead from Slytherin, and just like that, the cup is theirs. Bletchley jumps around the common room like he's deranged, Ginny laughing with Thompson. Draco predictably struts around the place like he'd single-handedly pulled off the victory, but Ginny's too happy to care.

Ginny starts to daydream about the presentation of the cup, the hall festooned with green and silver.

She has to put all of that aside for a while as her own finals loom.

Ginny has just finished sending an owl off to her father when Smita lifts an arm to stop her. Voices are echoing down the hallway, what sounds like Hermione and…Umbridge? They quickly step back into an alcove just in time to see Umbridge holding Harry and Hermione at wand point, marching them towards the grounds.

"What the hell is going on?" Ginny mutters to Smita. Neither of them is foolish enough to try to take on Umbridge, but Ginny is already spooling out the implications.

"We need to tell someone," Smita points out. She's read the Quibbler, she understands the kinds of things that are happening around Harry.

Ginny automatically thinks of the Order, of Grimmauld place. For all she knows, that's where Dumbledore is living. "Umbridge's office."

Smita looks up at her, quickly doing the maths. "You know who to contact?"

"Yes. Let's go."

They walk down the corridor as casually as possible, hoping not to run into any Inquisitorial Squads. They usually get a free pass as Slytherin, but there is no reason to push it with so much clearly going on right now.

Ginny slips an extendible ear under the door.

"From the sound of it, Draco, Crabbe, Goyle, Montague, and Pansy. With Ron, Luna, and Neville."

"Bad odds," Smita says.

Ginny frowns, considering all of the options. She shuffles through them, trying to find the best one with the least chance of getting caught. Or of giving Draco and his henchmen yet another reason for open hostility.

Why couldn't Umbridge have taken some of her squad with her?

Ginny straightens. "I have an idea." She lifts her wand to Smita's face.

Smita eyes Ginny. "They can't really be this thick."

"Oh," Ginny says, "I think they can be. Ready?"

Smita nods, her face and clothing seeming to float and blur. Ginny reminds herself to thank Antonia later.

Lifting her hand, Ginny bangs her fists against the door. "Boys," she bellows, voice pitched just so. Commanding but sickly sweet. "Come out here at once!"

The door just barely opens when the sound of choking echoes from inside, a few spells ricocheting off the walls. Luna yelping.

Smita shoves the door open, curse taking out Pansy while she has her hand still on the door handle. Ginny takes in the scene before her, but has little to do other than stun the moaning and writhing Goyle on the floor.

Ron, Neville, and Luna lift their wands, pointing them at Ginny and Smita.

"Whoa," Ginny says. "It's us."

Smita waves her wand, the enchantments melting from their faces.

Neville looks relieved, but Ron is still glancing around. "I heard Umbridge."

Ginny smiles. "I will have order!" she snaps, in a pretty great impersonation if she says so herself.

"Merlin, Gin," Ron says, looking freaked out and impressed.

"Shall we go after Harry and Hermione?" Luna asks, stepping over the prone form of Draco.

Ginny gestures towards the fire. "Shouldn't we tell someone?" she asks, trying to give Ron a significant glance.

Ron shakes his head, gathering up all the wands. "Harry tried already. There's no one there."

"What is going on?" Ginny demands, her head spinning with everything that has happened.

They step out into the hall, Ron pulling her close. "Harry thinks they have Sirius."

Ginny blanches, but refrains from asking any more questions as they rush out into the grounds.

They run into Harry and Hermione coming out the forest, both looking incredibly worse for wear. They're covered in what looks like…blood.

"How did you-?" Harry starts to ask, his eyes falling on Ginny and Smita.

"Ginny and Smita broke us out," Neville says.

"Ron nearly had it done on his own," Ginny says, giving her brother a grin.

Ron shrugs. "Ton-tongue toffees."

"Never take candy from strangers," Smita says with a solemn nod.

Ron startles them all with a loud laugh. "Sorry," he says, looking sheepish.

Smita suppresses a smile. "So where to now?"

Harry blusters and very nearly insults them all, but in the end has to capitulate.

They are going to the Department of Mysteries. Together.

* * *

><p>Thinking back on what happened in the Department of Mysteries, it's mostly a giant horrifying haze. Ginny remembers the terrible feel of flying on <em>nothing<em> but faith that there is animal you can't see. She remembers the hard cold masks of the death eaters, the shattering of glass under her Reductor curse, Ron being attacked by brains (can that memory be right?), but most of all, Smita falling. Falling, falling, falling.

The way Smita didn't get back up.

There had been Death Eaters and a wand at Ginny's throat, and in a blur the Order members sweeping in to the rescue. Ginny getting thrown back by a curse, slamming into the benches.

Sirius falling oh so quietly. Barely a whisper and then gone.

Harry bellowing and running and everything sliding black.

Then she's waking in the infirmary, safe and sound and tucked back in at Hogwarts as if the night had never happened, if not for the screaming pain in her side and the smell of potions and astringents in her nose.

_Smita_.

Ginny sits up with her heart in her throat, her eyes scanning the infirmary. She sees a shock of red hair that can only be her brother, and next to him, the bushy brown of Hermione. Down at the far end she finally locates Smita. Her eyes are open, her lips moving even if Ginny can't hear the words. She's sinking back into her own bed with relief when she realizes someone is sitting in a chair next to Smita's bed.

Tobias.

He has his head low over her, her hand clenched tightly in his. Pale and drawn as if he'd been part of the fight even when Ginny knows he wasn't. What is he doing-?

Ginny gets her answers as he presses his lips to Smita's forehead, Smita leaning into the touch.

Madam Pomfrey draws the curtain, blocking them from view.

Ginny barely thinks anything more than _here we go_ before sinking back into oblivion and away from the pain.

* * *

><p>Ginny hears a slight shift of air, like leaves rustling, and looks up to find Harry pulling off a cloak, that worn piece of parchment once again in his fingers. She feels a beat of relief seeing him, apparently whole and sound. Somehow, against all odds, they'd all made it back out.<p>

She feels her gut clench, remembering a dark arch and the empty space beyond.

Almost all of them.

"Harry?" she says, her voice a hushed croak. It must be day by now, or maybe even night again, to judge from the low light and quiet in the infirmary.

He seems surprised to find her awake, looking back over his shoulder and pulling the curtain tightly closed behind him. "They said you were all okay, but I…"

"Wanted to see for yourself?" she says, shifting up slightly in the bed. She grimaces when the movement pulls across her ribs. Oh, Merlin. Moving is not good.

"Ginny?" Harry asks, stepping further into the cubicle.

"I'm okay," she gasps, biting back against the pain flaring in her side.

He picks up the goblet on her bedside table. "You didn't finish your potion."

She pulls a face. "It tastes like feet."

His lips twitch. "Yeah. But it will make you feel better." He hands it to her.

She takes it, but doesn't drink it. She seems to remember it being warm, the metal cup now dull and cool against her fingers. "How is everyone else?" she asks, stalling.

He eyes her. "Sleeping." As she should be, is the unspoken part. Mum would be proud.

"Okay, okay. You win," she says, pinching her nose and downing the tepid, slimy potion in one go. Harry trades her the empty goblet for a glass of water. She chugs the whole glassful, but it still doesn't completely wash away the disgusting taste in her mouth.

She shudders with distaste, handing the glass back to Harry.

She expects him to leave as soon as she drinks it, but he lingers, looking awkward and uncertain in the enclosed space. Maybe exhaustion has finally taken hold. He stares at the curtains in the dim light as if they might hold some hidden answer.

"Harry?" she asks, already feeling warmth spreading across her ribs.

He blinks, refocusing on her. "Can I ask… Do you think…" He trails off.

"Do I think?" she prompts.

He looks like he might lose his nerve for a second, but this is Harry Potter, brave to the point of stupidity, no matter how exhausted and worn he looks. "Could you kill? If you had to?"

Ginny feels her gut clench, the potion roiling unpleasantly. "What?"

Harry shakes his head, stepping back as if to leave. "Forget it," he says.

She makes a clumsy grab for his sleeve, keeping him there. Things are moving too fast for her poor potion-addled brain, so she says the first thing that pops into her mind, something she feels like she somehow knows deep down in her bones. "You aren't a killer, Harry."

He closes his eyes, and she can't tell if that's what he wanted to hear or not.

She thinks about his rage tonight, the way he tore after Bellatrix like a wild thing. Is he scared of what he might have done to her, given the chance?

_Could you kill?_

Ginny thinks sometimes (_worries_) that maybe she could. Worries what that makes of her. But Harry? No. She doesn't have a doubt. She's watched him this last year, has gotten to know him as more than just her brother's friend. She's paid attention to the things he has chosen to teach them and the things he has not. And now that she's seen him actually in that moment, those rushing, terrifying moments where there is no time to think or remember ideals, he'd still lived them.

No, he's not a killer.

Her hand slips to his wrist, the potion working its way up her limbs. "I'm sorry," Ginny risks saying, her voice slow and dull. "I'm sorry about Sirius."

Harry looks away, his jaw clenching and eyes blinking rapidly. "Yeah," he says, voice rough.

Ginny's eyes drop closed, her body beginning to feel feather light.

She feels Harry place her hand back on the edge of the bed with almost undue care. "Ginny?" he whispers.

"Hmm?"

"Do you think maybe I could just…sit here for a little while?"

She nods her head, her cheek pressing into the pillow.

She falls asleep to the sound of Ron's snores and the feeling that Harry is sitting nearby.

* * *

><p>They are all released from the infirmary the next day, to a castle alive with whispers and changes and everything being different and yet exactly the same.<p>

Ginny and Smita sit together on a couch in the common area.

"So," Ginny says.

"So," Smita agrees, cheeks red.

They glance at Tobias across the room with the other boys in their year.

This will be different.

* * *

><p>Loading up on the Hogwarts Express is bedlam like always, made even trickier by Tobias' absolute refusal to let Smita lift anything, particularly her heavy trunk. They all three know how to do a locomotor charm, but Tobias has been in a particularly strange and annoying mood ever since Smita was injured. He's trying to heft both his own and Smita's trunks up onto the train. Ginny tries to intervene, but it's Neville who appears from nowhere to lift the other ends of the trunks.<p>

Tobias scowls something fierce, but doesn't complain.

Somehow in Tobias' twisty mind, he has decided that the DA is responsible for what happened to Smita, for the danger she'd thoughtlessly put herself in. Ginny wonders how much of that is anger that he hadn't been there himself.

She smiles at Neville in thanks when Tobias doesn't bother to.

Walking down the train together, they pass by a compartment full of DA members.

From inside, Harry looks up at Ginny, but it almost feels like his eyes don't quite connect, like he's distant from everything around him.

_Could you kill, if you had to?_

Ginny shivers.

Neville pulls open the compartment door, giving the three of them an awkward wave. "See you, Ginny. Smita. Tobias."

Tobias nods stiffly, Smita smiling slightly. They move on down the hall, Smita's hand tucked firmly into Tobias'.

"Have a good summer, Neville," Ginny says, glancing at the DA members one last time before turning for the Slytherin compartments.

* * *

><p>Going home to the Burrow for the summer is like time travel, returning somewhere they expect her to be exactly as she was even though she's seen things, <em>done<em> things that can't ever be taken back. She's not a little girl anymore, no matter how appealing it might be to pretend. Dolores Umbridge and a dark night in the Department of Mysteries sometimes feel like the least of it.

It's even worse than Umbridge's class, back to being wandless and spell-less, only now she knows, knows first hand what is out there.

Her parents either don't understand this, or simply don't want to believe it. As if something like housework could possibly matter when people are dying and taking sides and not even Hogwarts feels completely safe.

She can't really hide in numbers any more either. It's just Mum and Dad and Ron and her, a parenting ratio she's never faced before.

Ron walks through their nearly empty house like nothing has changed, even as the scars on his arms tell a different story. She wants to ask how he can _do_ that, just go on like the world hasn't changed, like they are still children.

He's annoyed by Mum's hovering, just as much as ever, but never does anything more than roll his eyes or sneak out of the house just to avoid her.

Ginny is the one bristling with heat, her mouth getting ahead of her cool the way she didn't dare allow at school. Dad's not around much, and Ron is smart enough to avoid it. It just leaves Mum in her path, so different from Antonia and Smita and Burbage, bustling around her little house as if any of this matters. As if perfect biscuits and knitting could have helped Ginny in the Ministry, could have helped her deal with the fact that people like Umbridge are real.

It's why every answer out of Ginny's mouth erupts with a sarcastic twist, a barb pressed home with ruthless accuracy. She sees the way her mother tries to pretend it doesn't bother her, this sudden brittleness between them, and the attempt only makes Ginny angrier.

She's pissed off at her mother and can't even say why.

It only takes a week for the storm to reach the breaking point. Ginny doesn't even remember what she said exactly, just the look on Mum's face, the terrible silence at the table after.

"Ginny," Mum says, voice betraying a calm that is a thousand times more shattering than her familiar bellow. "I would like you to leave this table."

Ginny glares over her half-eaten meal, and barely resists the urge to sweep the plate to the floor. Dad's face is set, his eyes not on her, but on Mum. She thinks he must be holding her hand under the table.

Ron's staring at her like she's a stranger.

Ginny stands up without a word and walks out to the front porch. She storms up and down the creaking boards, her breath rushing in and out like she's just finished a race. She has the craziest urge to slam her fist into the porch column.

_Would probably bring the whole giant mess of a house down_, she thinks viciously, as if she didn't love every worn and familiar inch of this place. What the hell is wrong with her?

It's her father who finally joins her, sitting her down on the steps and taking her hand in his. He ignores it when she tries to tug away, to snap something stupid like, "I'm _fourteen_, Dad." Not a child any more. Just acting like one.

Her classmates would heap scorn down on her for it.

It's only once she's calmed, once they've sat unmoving for who knows how long that he starts telling her quietly about a girl named Molly Prewett. A girl with fire and spirit and a stinging hex that no one ever forgot. A girl who could have gone anywhere and done anything, a woman who lived through war only to see it come around a second time.

Ginny feels angry tears pressing at the back of her eyes.

Dad leans in closer, like imparting some great secret. "There's a difference between not having power, and choosing not to use it."

Ginny closes her eyes, forcing herself not to hold on tighter when his hand slips from hers.

He leaves her sitting out there to think about it, the sun dragging slowly down below the trees lining the pasture.

Hours later when she slinks back inside, there's a plate with a perfect warming charm waiting for her on the table.

She sits and eats.

* * *

><p>Ginny spends two days watching her mother as she moves through the seemingly mundane routines of her life—the swish of her arm with each little spell, the tension of muscles and restraint in the snap of her wrist. She imagines herself a stranger and takes a second, third, fiftieth look at Molly Prewett Weasley.<p>

_Things aren't always what they seem._

Ginny considers that subtlety is its own sort of power, one not easily mastered.

Blowing out a long breath, Ginny follows her mother outside into the overgrown yard.

Together, they peg up the laundry.


End file.
